


Rope Swing

by chess_boxing



Category: Muse
Genre: Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 18:59:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1576106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chess_boxing/pseuds/chess_boxing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the horror fest prompt: "Dom's a young teenager i.e. under the age of consent who got bullied quite a lot at his old school in London and due to his anxiety around people as a result, his parents feel they need to give him a new start. They move to a really, really remote old Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, just a village within driving distance. Dom's new room is in the attic, and after a while he starts to realise that Matt, a lonely ghost about his age who's inhabited the house for over a century, has taken an interest in him."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dominic knew very well that the relocation was, for him, an escape. It exhausted him. The car journey exhausted him, the packing of boxes exhausted him, and his parents’ constant crusade to ensnare him in celebration exhausted him. The way he saw it, an escape was only cause to celebrate when one made that rare escape unscathed - not so fortunate himself, his own escape left him in a precarious balance on the edge of sanctuary, where he might curl up and tend to his injuries without fear of further suffering. You do not dance in a sanctuary.

  
His head had spent the last two hours rattling from where his cheek was pressed, firm and cold, against the dark car window. The car had protested against the potholes and had seemed to voice its discontent around the insides of his skull. It had vibrated and jerked and shuddered and occasionally smacked his temple into the glass, but now, in its absence, his head rang with a strange and hollow quiet, and the car door’s clunking sounded tinny and far away as he pushed it open and climbed outside into the night.

  
When she spoke, his mother’s tone was a familiar one; his ears plucked it from the library of tones and inflections that it had constructed through his past and rubber-stamped that particular collection of noises as  _‘nothing you haven’t heard before’_ . The family car’s headlights cast a yellow triangle across the driveway and their beams lit a warm arc across the front door. Pulling his case from the back seat, Dominic started through its glow before his parents could divert him for unpacking duties, or worse, housewarming.  


  
_His footsteps tapped, sharp and clear, up the stone steps and he glanced at the sign above the front door. It tensed his muscles as though the boy were physically bracing himself to step across its threshold, and he unconsciously tightened his fist around the straps of his school backpack. Lungs struggled with a new, rapid, shallow rate. And then he walked inside._   


  
Inside, the house was as dark as the outside, and his fingertips stumbled over black beams and white walls to find the light switch - Dominic’s father pushed ahead of him, muttering something about how it had taken ages for them to find the switches when they came last week to move the furniture - and the room went creamy-soft with warm light, the colour of bedsheets. Dominic mumbled his intentions to go straight to sleep.

  
His father directed him around the corner to where there was a battered oak door set with black hinges and traditional latches, unused in favour of a modern doorknob, which would lead him to the stairs. He started down the small hallway towards it, case trundling behind him, when his mother bustled through the front doorway with a large, poorly-taped cardboard box, and promptly dropped the whole thing.

  
_The sound of his possessions tumbling to the floor was followed by a harsh, sharp spit of a laugh and then the soft crumple of Dominic’s ripped-open backpack being discarded atop its contents. It was with a sense of relief that the school bell sounded somewhere on the other side of the back buildings; they abandoned him to pick up the pieces in nervous silence. Sighing and kneeling, he began repacking his bag. The playground bit his knees through his uniform trousers. Scooping up the last of the pencils that had rolled away, he hoisted the bag back over one shoulder and shuffled away to face another detention slip - justice served for his lateness._   


  
Dominic jumped and felt familiar trembles creeping through his bones at the loud noise, and hurried away from the room. His hand was already shaking weakly when he reached for the doorknob and he scrunched it into a frustrated fist before trying the door.

  
_It wouldn’t budge, and his fingers only hurt for trying. No pleas or shouts would convince them to open the cupboard back up and so he fell quiet instead, hoping they might get bored, but instead Dominic heard them retreating. The cloakroom door swung closed and soon his panic attack faded away to be replaced by muscle aches, and the only noise in East Wing was the tired and half-hearted pounding of his fist echoing on the wooden door._   


  
The stairs and their yellowy-cream carpets curled up like orange peel through the huge building, spanning the ground, first, and second floors before straightening out to stretch into the attic. By the third flight, Dominic’s legs were aching and his arm was straining from where it was pulling his suitcase clear of each step. His mind was wandering. Concentration slipping, the case swung against his leg and he tripped, cracking his shin on the stair above.

  
_A thin line of blood was sticking his trousers to his shin, the black fabric even blacker with the wet red. Dominic barely dared look up from where he knelt on the toilet floor. There were none of the chants of encouragement or shouted perjoratives of the open playground this time - they had been replaced by one quiet, dreadful command, and no-one could afford to be caught for this one. Feeling a dozen eyes on him and the fist tangled in his hair, he closed his eyes._   


  
Swearing softly at what was doubtlessly a new bruise, he resorted to pulling the handle up from his case and dragging it as though the floor was flat. The house resonated with that dull, thick, hard thudding of each and every stair against the case’s useless wheels and Dominic ignored it, boredly stamping on, up the final flight to the attic.

  
_Thud._   


_it seemed wrong_  


  
_Thud._   


  
_that the pain_   


  
_Thud._   


  
_was louder than the sound._   


  
_The porcelain of the bathroom sink was speckled red and his hair was a warm, matted tangle on one side, soaking up the blunt gashes beneath it. Each thud oozed more blood. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t keep each pitiful, humiliating cry locked behind his lips. When they abandoned him for the walk to class, he slid into a limp heap on the tiles, and that was how the teacher found him, silent and boneless._   


  
Pushing the attic door open, Dominic left that final wooden flight and awkwardly elbowed his way into his new room.

  
It was certainly dark, but not black-dark; more a soft blue-dark that the eye could gently adjust to, and so he decided against seeking out yet another elusive light switch in favour of examining the place in its natural state.

  
Everything looked as though he might catch a splinter off it if he wasn’t careful, but the effect had a melancholy, distressed beauty about it. The faintest of natural lights - from the moon, or the stars, he couldn’t quite tell - painted diagonal stripes across the space from one large square window on his left. A small single bed was pushed up against the wall, just beyond those patches of light, and a desk with a chair stood at its feet. Stripped, greyish floorboards drew straight lines directly between the window and an empty archway, the wooden door long since removed. A small bathroom lay behind it.

  
Across the space, stripped wooden beams of the same texture and tone as the floorboards crossed the gap between the top of the eaves and the bathroom wall. Similar beams lanced upward, clinging the left side of the roof to meet its apex, high above - the space above the horizontal beams was trapped beyond their bars; inaccessible. The attic of the attic.

  
Eyes adjusting, Dominic lay down his case in the patch of light cast by the window and began unzipping it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the new house - he didn’t miss where he used to live, but the unfamiliarity was a draining force on an already weary mind. Tugging his pyjamas out of the suitcase, his favourite sweatshirt fell out in the process, and he eyed it hesitantly before picking it up, hugging it to his chest, burying his nose in it and breathing deeply.

  
_The smell kept him calm as his parents talked, one after the other, each nodding firmly through the other’s speech. Curled up on the sofa behind his bent knees, with part of his long, soft hair sharply shaved away so that the injuries on his head could be stitched, he peered over his sweatshirt with disappointed, dismayed eyes. They explained, bluntly, that loyalty to an adolescent phase was not worth being beaten over. His heart sank to think that he had expected sympathy, and he realised a very clear connection in that moment - that the systems that drove the other students were the same systems that drove his parents. A Christian school with Christian values._   


  
He didn’t bother to unpack, instead pulling out his washbag and taking it through to the ensuite bathroom. It was surprisingly clean - not that he’d expected cobwebs and damp crawling up the walls, but the modern cuts and clean lines of the place weren’t something he’d expected. The washbasin was set immediately opposite the door, with the toilet on its left and a shower cubicle on its right. Switching on the light, Dominic watched his reflection in the mirror flash from silhouette to human.

  
His bruises were soft shadows now, and some only manifested themselves in blushed blotches around his cheekbone on one side. Leaning in, he examined his own face, touching it gently where it had once been too sore. Even his shaved hair wasn’t really visible anymore; longer strands tumbled over the short patch and they blended together. He continued inspecting the damage of the last few months while he brushed his teeth, only breaking his gaze to lean down and spit toothpaste foam into the sink.

  
_Blood splattered weakly into the sink of the nurse’s office, his mouth hurting too much to do anything much more than dribble. It felt as though the liquid was filling his mouth faster than he could get it out, and he thought he might be sick - a terrifying thought, considering his fractured ribs. He peered between the rust-speckles on the streaked mirror and parted his lips to check he wasn’t missing a tooth, and found each one lined where blood had gathered where they joined his gums, as though his mouth had been sketched in red ink. Voices drifted through the cracked door; parents, headteacher. ‘New start’. They were pulling him out. But they weren’t pressing charges._   


  
He turned his back on the mirror to undress and winced as he stretched, back twisting up to tug his pyjama top over his head. Once his pyjamas were pulled on, Dominic dropped into the small bed and curled up tight to the wall, the blankets closely packed around his body. The air was cold; it took him a nervous, shivery while to fall asleep. It was only when his eyes fluttered closed and his nose was firmly buried in warm duvet that the second pair of eyes in the room dared blink. They twitched. Tentative, spidery footsteps fell feather-light on the floorboards, seeking a shy, inquisitive closer look.

  
Matthew had a new roommate.

  



	2. Chapter 2

“We’re going to take a drive down to the village, maybe see the shops. Meet the vicar.”

  
“Well, it’d be silly to spend your first day in your room.”

  
“Maybe meet some pretty girl in the church!”

  
“Maybe ask about weekend jobs in the baker’s!”

  
“It’s hiding away that got you in this mess in the first place.”

  
“Of course they will. People can sense shyness and then it just comes across as weakness, and they don’t like it.”

  
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dominic, can’t we have  _one_  conversation where you don’t start -  _fine, walk away-”_  


  
Brushing that one trembly, poorly-hidden tear from his cheek with his sleeve, Dominic watched it blot a darker circle into the grey fabric as he escaped up the stairs with his cereal bowl in one hand. The big oak door shut harshly on its fake latches behind him. When his feet cleared the final steps, he slipped into the attic sideways, a swift movement through the cracked door. His cereal was milky mush.

  
He was quickly warming to his room, its spindly angles and its diagonals - all drawn in cold wood and cobweb and shafts of light. The floorboards were bathed in squares of sunlight this time, and it was in them that he sat, cross-legged, to finish his breakfast.

  
The window frame only stood ten inches or so off the ground, and so to look directly ahead was for Dominic to gaze upon the view that had escaped his sight last night. Directly down, there was a stone patio on which his parents might entertain guests on warm summer evenings; he lifted his head away to dismiss it, instead taking in the field that swept up from that regular and measured paving and up a lopsided and distant hill. A slow, grassy, messy hill; a hill whose slopes would normally have been marred by chalky footpaths so that walkers might avoid its long, wild grasses and the broken ankles caught in many a rabbit warren. A lone oak tree graced its peak. Beyond, further hills played away in varying hues of blues and greys towards the horizon, but Dominic’s eyes never strayed beyond  _this_ one.

  
It glowed. Which, to be fair, was just because of the current light, and was born of no more than a fortunate position of window, sun, and clouds - but in that moment, it snatched up his heart and he felt it melt. That feeling was inspiration, and it was especially powerful in someone young enough to only have really experienced it a handful of times.

  
Dominic’s spoon clattered in its half-empty bowl on the floor, half caught in a sunlight-square. Fabric flopped out of his suitcase as his winter coat was tugged from its depths, and he shrugged it on while his feet drummed an unsteady, rhythmic rush down the stairs.

  
Hands deep in its pockets, he stormed hurriedly through the kitchen to leave the back door clattering on its hinges before anyone could call him back. The air was crisp in his chest. It cut and cooled his nerves; his chilled skin paled and shivered, but the sensation was definitely preferable to the prickly blush of discomfort that he’d felt at the breakfast table. Soon, the effort of climbing the hill caught up with him, and he untied his coat to let the sharp breeze and its blissful cold play between the fabric and his skin. It snapped and fluttered around his body.

  
Sweeping his hair back from his eyes - it whipped and streamed in long, tangled ribbons when the wind picked up - Dominic frowned against the sunlight pouring from the sky to peer at the tree. He was beginning to hear the rustling of its leaves over the breeze hissing through the wild grasses, and his feet regularly kicked through dusky auburn leaves where they had fluttered to the earth throughout October. Really, he knew, he was hoping for low, strong branches worth climbing.

  
Then he saw the rope.

  
It was coiled around a higher branch, looped loosely and swinging idly amongst the leaves.

  
He was sure, squinting up at the looming treetop as he entered the dappled patches beneath its shade, that he could make it up high enough to pull it down.

  
Dominic’s coat lay crumpled beside a knotted root at the base of the tree’s trunk as he scaled it, bark flecks and dry leaves catching in his hair and his top. Scrapes scattered his palms and his elbows. It was when he found a length of the rope to tug that something further up gave way, and the whole thing unravelled, tumbling, snapping, and sending down a flurry of loose leaves as it tore through the lower branches, something much heavier in tow.

  
Dominic stared down over his shoulder, eyes wide and delightedly disbelieving. He’d found a swing.

  
The tyre at its end swayed erratically from the fall beneath one thick branch, which he could see now held a firm, age-worn loop of rope that had cut a groove into the bark. Careful with his footing, the boy eased his body down a reverse route to his climb and leapt the last few feet to hit the earth once again.

  
Touching the tyre with his fingertips to bring it to a halt, he wrapped both hands around the rope and hauled himself up to sit atop the tyre, one leg either side of the knot around its middle, and shifted his weight until it was swinging back and forth smoothly beneath the tree, at which point momentum and the breeze took over. Dominic’s arms wrapped around himself and his cheek pressed against the rope.

  
His feet hung, pointed, each of his shoelaces a straight line down to the scuffed dirt beneath the swing. Low, haunted eyes gazed down the horizon. Blonde hair stuck to his cheek and fluttered across his upper back; he stayed on the swing long after every inch of his skin had pebbled up with gooseflesh, and only dared to wander back to the house after he was sure his parents had long since left for the village. He’d worried about feeling uncomfortable, but found that the unease of the house had dissipated upon his return. Maybe because it was empty.

  
At a bit of a loss as to how to kill the time next, he hung up his coat in the hallway and made himself a plate of food to take upstairs. Along with it he brought hot chocolate and, as an afterthought, balanced an empty glass and a packet of biscuits in his arms to bring with him. He had an ensuite. Food was really the only thing he needed from downstairs. It would ease his mind to know that at least there was a supply if he felt particularly vulnerable or shy of his parents.

  
Upstairs, he filled the glass with crisp water that tasted like the air he’d just come inside from, and set it down to leave a soft, dark liquid ring against the window ledge. The circle bled faintly into the grain of wood that spanned its breadth. A couple of spots of hot chocolate dotted the space beside it as Dominic placed his mug beside it, and biscuit crumbs scattered as the packet opened.

  
The sunlight squares had swung a little further towards the door. Only his left knee was lit up by them as he sat cross-legged before the window again and lay a book open in his lap, its spine crossing both his ankles.

  
It passed the time, he supposed.

  
It wasn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon.

  
It put him in places that weren’t the house, which became especially important after he felt the slight shudder in the frame of it as his parents slammed the front door behind them. They called him down to dinner as the light got low, and on his return he paused to lock the door before sitting down to his book again. His eyes were straining to pick the words from the paper, but he was determined to finish the chapter by the time he fell asleep. Every so often, he would pause to glance up at the hill and at the tree steeped in twilight, and let his mind wander over its slopes and glide the arc of the rope swing.

  
One such glance sweeped from word to page to window, and it was partway down this path that he noticed his glass of water.

  
Or, rather, the dark circle it had traced onto the ledge.

  
Or,  _rather_  rather, the smiley face that was now drawn in that circle.

  
Dominic’s chest seized up like his left lung had decided to swap with his right. His eyes stared at the smiley face’s eyes. More than a little unsettled, he coughed quietly before returning to his page.

  
He couldn’t for the fucking life of him remember where he’d left off.

  
Feeling the alarm creep onto his face, he peered back over the edge of his book and bit his lip. The smile still stained the surface beneath the glass, its wooden gaze relentless and eerie. His fingertips worried at the corner of one page, marring it with little crinkles, and he leaned forward to pick the glass up.

  
It wasn’t some weird trick; a phantom of the little remaining light refracting through the glass and the water. Droplets had displaced into that pattern and then sunk to stain deep into the wood.

  
Dominic dipped three fingers into the glass of water and swiped them across the face, wetting it so that the whole thing bled dark. He replaced the glass hurriedly, a few inches to the left. The liquid sloshed; drops ran tiny rivers down its sides and drew a new circle.

  
He wanted to return to his book, but his fingers were balled in fists on the pages now, obscuring all the words, and his eyes couldn’t be torn from the glass of water, which carried ever-dwindling ripples as the movement died out. Dominic was just beginning to convince himself that it was all due to some freak chance when a dot of water blossomed up from the wood and pressed itself to the glass, spreading into an irregular oval, the shape and size of which roughly matched a fingertip. Another followed - an inch to the right - and the eyes were drawn.

  
Scrambling on the floorboards, Dominic lurched away, half-crouched in his intrigue to watch the impossible happening in his glass of water, and yet also poised to flee. His book landed on the floor and snapped shut.

  
The shape watched him, both its eyes blankly impassive, their edges splitting and diffusing slightly where the water seeped into the shape of the wood.

  
Another dot burst below one eye, and his stomach twisted up as it began dragging, fingertip-like, spreading a stained curve across the circle.

  
Beneath his glass was a frowning face.

  
His expression contorted with fear and Dominic snatched up the glass. He launched it hard at the window ledge and the water splashed, exploding out and spattering up the window, dripping, spotting, _soaking_ the wood until all images were erased and glittering trickles were drawing their own lines over and between the floorboards. Biscuit crumbs and dried hot chocolate drops washed away. The glass rolled to a halt. Shaking slightly, he twisted around and stormed to the darkened bathroom just so that he didn’t have to look at it.

  
Breathing heavily, he rested both hands on the edge of the sink and leaned, trying to calm down from what was probably a fluke, or his imagination. Probably imagination. Wouldn’t be the first time. His nails were too worn to chew; one more bite would probably burst them down to bleed - but the chill from earlier had quickly cleared up his nerves, he thought, and turned the cold tap to splash his face with freezing water.

  
It was good - he watched his eyes relax in the mirror, their lids laden with clinging droplets - and then glanced towards the shower.

  
Showers always helped him come back to earth. They felt like tiny, isolated worlds, and yet their glass walls prevented claustrophobia. They were bright and yet there was nothing to look at; full of sensation, and yet very little to feel. Full of sound but nothing to listen to. Exactly what he needed.

  
Turning the dial, a curtain of cold water slammed down on his forearm before he could retract it, and the way it flinched and prickled up with goosebumps was deeply comforting. Dominic glanced back regretfully at the door frame - he’d really have preferred it to hold an actual door - but it was almost dark anyway, and he began undressing with a shrug. A little pool of clothing lay at his feet when he pushed the shower screen aside and disappeared inside.

  
The cold helped to start off with but it quickly just led to a frowning, shivering, sodden Dominic, so he turned it up and felt the tension in his muscles melt into the heat. The old bruises across his body ached a little less. Breathing steam, he ran his fingers through his hair. The water felt like it ran through him as much as over him; his lips turned up and smiled gratefully, like he was kissing the stream where it rushed down to meet him. The steam hissed from the shower and surrounded Dominic’s lithe, gleaming body in clouds that constantly replaced themselves as they rose, black from where he hadn’t turned on the spotlight set into the ceiling above where he stood.

  
With time, when he felt recovered, he switched off the shower and stretched one foot out, creeping on tip-toes to the towel rail so that he’d leave as few puddles as possible on the tiles before drying off. Steam filled the small room, and he could even see it billowing out to his bedroom; when he crossed the doorframe, he saw the clouds blurring and dulling the pale windowpanes as light filtered through the moisture - that light was moonlight now, bluish and cool. Slipping a towel around his waist, he dropped another to the floor in front of the sink. His toes scrunched up in it. Footprints bloomed through the fabric.

  
Pushing his water-dark hair back, Dominic looked up to the mirror.

  
The mirror was shrouded in mist and his reflection was barely visible, but someone had drawn an unmistakable word into it, right at the very top.

  
_‘hi’_   



	3. Rope Swing

His skin crawled and constricted. His blood froze. He backed away, bare feet on droplet-spotted tiles, heart pounding, the edges of his vision going dark with panic. Dominic’s chest began to heave with each breath, as though his lungs were refusing the oxygen hanging in the steam-laced air. Each time he gasped in, his stomach would suck painfully in and his ribs showed underneath in harsh, quivering bumps. Though his face had drained of colour and he was stumbling backwards out of the room, his terrified eyes still couldn’t tear themselves from that one dark, clear shape cut into the mirror.

  
_‘hi’_   


  
The drops of water clinging and running little rivulets down his skin seemed to prickle and choke now, and the steam was reaching down his throat as though the room intended to drown him where he stood. His footing failed on the uneven switch from tile to floorboard and the brief stumble was enough to kick his senses back in; forcing his stare away from the mirror, he backed unsteadily out of the room and brought his free hand to his mouth, the other one fisting where his towel was clutched around his waist.   


  
Wishing, once more, that the bathroom had a door, he retreated to the furthest corner from both the window and the mirror and snatched up his pyjamas along the way. He didn’t even wait for the panic attack to subside; his violently shaking fingers stumbled uselessly in the waistline of his boxers as he tried to get his legs into them, and Dominic’s breaths carried helpless whimpers as they left his lips.   


  
Then he was dressed, and he wasn’t sure what to do.   


  
He paused, crouched slightly, and sank down to his knees to hesistantly listen to the room.   


  
Aside from the soft, intermittent drips of the showerhead, there wasn’t anything to hear, though it _was_ possible that anything much softer was simply being drowned out by his frantic breathing. Dominic put all his energy into calming himself, laying one hand on his chest and applying gentle pressure to coincide with each breath’s pace - in through his nose, out through his mouth - until they quieted.   


  
Still nothing to hear.   


  
Now that he was thinking slightly straighter, he felt a little twinge of shame creeping up his neck. He wasn’t sure what he _expected_ to hear. There was the possibility that it had been his mum, or his dad, and that he just hadn’t heard them walk in, and that he’d just had a panic attack for an empty room. Thanking god that they had at least done him the courtesy of leaving before he’d had a breakdown, Dominic stood up and walked slowly - tentatively - to the door. He’d make a point of locking it from now on.   


  
His hand froze an inch from the brass of the doorknob.   


  
It _was_ locked.   


  
Of course it was, he thought. If there was one thing he never neglected, it was locked doors. Letting his fingers curl in retreat, he turned around and absently looked at the room. A sharp pain shooting through his other hand pulled his gaze down - he’d bitten one nail too far down again, and beads of blood were bursting out along its edge.   


  
Twisting up his hand, as though burying the cut into his palm would erase it, Dominic crept across the room, curiosity and confusion winning out. He switched on the bathroom light and it flooded with brightness, sending aches to the backs of his eyes. The mirror gradually slipped into view around the doorframe.    


  
The word was gone, but only in the sense that it had been swept across by several fingertips in a scribbly side-to-side movement. Below it had emerged a new message.   


  
_ ‘oh my god calm down’ _   


  
Well.

  
Dominic wasn’t quite sure how to react to that.   


  
Head tilted to one side, he let his fingertip bleed thread-thin red lines into the grooves of his palm and stared at the message, simultaneously creeped out beyond belief but also a little too taken aback to be afraid. It wasn’t the kind of message that he felt it was appropriate to fear _or_ approach. Watching drops of condensation draw straight lines down from some of the letters, Dominic blinked a few times and walked into the bathroom.   


  
It was still warm from the steam, which ghosted over the skin of his arm as he raised it; the hairs on it stood on end and, instinctively, he put one finger to the glass and started to write a slow _‘h’_ for _‘hello?’_. The letter was wobbly with uncertainty.   


  
It happened in a flash - he had barely finished a single letter when the mirror seemed to catch alight beneath his fingertip. Dominic yelped, snatching it back. He checked for burns, expecting red to flare up from the paleness on the soft pad of his finger, but it merely stung a little. Sucking it into his mouth, his eyes were huge and alarmed as they returned to look up at the mirror. The steam was beginning to recede from the edges.   


  
A scribble wiped out the only letter he’d drawn, and followed it up with a new sentence, this time scrawled quickly.   


  
_“‘I can hear you’,”_ Dominic read aloud, barely mouthing the words around his finger. He let it fall from his mouth and replaced it with the bloody one; the sharp tang of iron burst along his tongue. Sucking thoughtfully, his brow furrowed with thought and he peered a little closer.   


  
“Well, that’s not sinister at all,” he finally declared aloud to the mirror, the retort carrying strength and confidence that broke a little of the tension in the attic. He shifted where he stood, folded his arms, and found himself willing a new message to appear.   


  
_‘sorry’_ , the mirror answered, followed by an unhappy face.    


  
“That’s alright, I guess. No worries.”   


  
He shrugged, incapable of holding in an incredulous smile at what was either a talking mirror or his newfound madness. Neither seemed particularly harmful. The sad face was rubbed out and replaced with a smile.   


  
“So. What is this? How’re you doing that?”   


  
_ ‘my name is Matthew’ _   


  
_“My name is Matthew,”_ Dominic echoed lowly, “cool, nice to meet you, Matthew. I’m Dominic.”   


  
_ ‘i know’ _   


  
The letters were much smaller than before, and Dominic sensed the thought processes of someone who had just realised that they might need an awful lot more space than the mirror might provide. After a pause, the _‘i know’_ was brushed away, and replaced with _‘hi, Dominic’_ \- the mirror-writing equivalent to backspacing an instant message, he supposed. A circle appeared around the previous smiley face as though to highlight it. To bring it back again.   


  
“You didn’t answer my question,” Dominic challenged, but his words stumbled a little bit and he brought up one of his hands to chew on one of the nails. His voice didn’t sound strong; the brief spell of confidence had crumbled away. “What _is_ this?”

  
_‘don’t want to say’_ , the mirror said after a moment.   


  
“W-why not?”   


  
The reply took a while this time, and his nail had been bitten right down to the quick before the letters began appearing, careful and small.   


  
_‘i haven’t talked to anybody in a long long time’_ , they spelled, shortly followed by a very messy, very hasty _‘don’t want to muck it up’_.   


  
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dominic shrugged, trying a weak smile. His reflection was beginning to show through the clearish spaces of mirror that had been drawn with messages. He tried to ignore it. “It’s okay, it takes a lot to freak me out. Well. No, not really, I mean,” he started to tail off, “lots of things scare me more than other people, and really, I suppose, just about everything scares me. Everything normal, though. Strange things are actually better. I chose to talk to a mirror over running away to tell my parents,” he finished with a nervous laugh, his gaze falling on the floor before lifting again, “so, that probably says all you need to know.”   


  
_ ‘i know you’re not lonely on purpose.’ _   


  
Dominic blinked. At first, it took him by surprise - but then the longer it lingered in the steam, the deeper it seemed to sink in, until it hit him in the heart and his brows knitted together sadly. He just quirked a little sideways-smile and shrugged in vague confession.   


  
“You too?”   


  
The next drawing wasn’t a message at all. It was a handprint, and it pressed to flatten out some of the previous words. It was a left hand; the fingers were long, slim and splayed out, and below the shape, trickles of water leaked downwards.   


  
_ ‘I’m dead’ _   


  
When Dominic didn’t react, a sad face was added to the word _‘dead’_.    


  
“Like a ghost?” he asked, smiling back despite himself, and earning the response _‘suppose so’_. “A lonely ghost. Matthew the lonely ghost.”   


  
Twitching his fingers - and unsure why it felt like the proper thing to do - he raised his left hand too and pressed it into the handprint that Matthew had left.   


  
“High five.”   


  
The mirror was hot to the touch. Not like before - not a burn - but more like he was holding the flat of his hand out to a campfire. It spread all through his hand and a little up his arm, tingling gently.   


  
“You’re warm,” he commented.   


  
_ ‘yep’ _   


  
The ‘p’ trailed a drop of water that ran all the way down to the bottom edge of the mirror, making it absurdly long; Dominic’s eyes flicked to it and then back to his hand.   


  
“Why?”   


  
_‘you want me to explain-’_ the words shrank to their smallest size yet, _‘the laws of paranormal thermodynamics on a fucking mirror?’_   


  
Face lighting up with the first wide, bright, genuine smile in weeks, Dominic’s nose crinkled happily and he nodded.   


  
“Yeah, I do.”   


  
_ ‘................ok’ _   


  
His grin slipped but stayed while Matthew clearly thought about his answer.   


  
_ ‘life = energy _   


  
_ heat = energy _   


  
_ me = life trace = ta-daaaaaaaaaaa’ _   


  
Dominic giggled as each of the ‘a’s got smaller and smaller, trailing off and curving at the edge of the mirror. He raised his right hand and put it into the space where he guessed Matthew’s drawing hand was, and it was rewarded with another gentle flood of heat.   


  
“Hello,” he grinned, wiggling his fingers on both hands. It occurred to him that the handprint beneath his own was just about the same size. “So, um, how old are you?”   


  
_ ‘a/s/l? 15, not much, bathroom’ _   


  
“Okay,” he laughed, “I… same. We have, kind of, the same hands. The size, I mean. What d'you look like?”   


  
Waiting for an answer, he realised that there was _very_ little space to actually write on now.   


  
“Uh… do you want me to put the shower on again? Kind of... refresh the steam?”   


  
The final couple of square inches were filled with two things - another smiley face, and a single word.   


  
_ ‘follow?’ _   


  
The warmth in his hands shifted to one side - Matthew’s heat traces had moved a little further in that direction - and Dominic copied the movement to find him again.   


  
Stuttered, tentative shuffling to chase the heat on his palms led him to turn on his heel, standing in the doorframe, and it was there that his hands fell cold. Dominic stuck his bottom lip out at first and wiggled his fingers, reaching out, but frowned when there was nothing there but the natural temperature of the attic.

  
“I’ve lost you.”   


  
He twisted around to check the mirror for a clue, but there was none, and when he turned back to look straight ahead then his heart near enough stopped in his chest.   


  
If this was a hallucination, it was his best yet, he thought. The light from the bathroom seemed to drown the image out, and Dominic flicked the switch off; his stare didn’t so much as falter as he took a few steps closer, and the room sank back into soft blue shadows that shrank away from the starlit window.   


  
It was framed in the pale light of it that Matthew was caught. He didn’t seem to stand - he had feet but they seemed unburdened by his weight - no, _caught_ was the right word, Dominic thought. Caught like a dewdrop strung upon a spider’s web; caught like a fish fluttering in a current, its scales gleaming where blue light soaked downward from the waves above. Most striking of all, Matthew’s image ceased to be whenever it did not lie within one of those direct, slanted columns of moonlight, and so he seemed caught upon an invisible set of bars, like a series of paintings hung out to dry.   


  
If his image had been more imposing, Dominic might not have had the nerve to approach, but Matthew’s small stature didn’t demand the fearful reverence that he’d expected from the dead, and he found himself treading softly closer. The ghost was not translucent; when the natural light touched him, his state did not shift or flicker or fade. He did not have an aura, did not float, did not glow. Aside from the strangeness of the gravity - which didn’t even so much as pull on his dark clothes - he simply resembled a terribly thin, terribly shy boy, who held up a hand in a small, awkward wave and offered a tiny smile.   


  
Dominic was too stunned to return it but his fascination and wonder were more than evident on his face.    


“I’m sorry if I stare,” he murmured, coming to a halt before the ghost, whose face was also lit with interest and delight. Matthew’s lips were curved up in a smile, and Dominic felt his own expression mirror it.

  
Matthew’s skin seemed cut from porcelain but cut was too sheer, too hard a word - despite its solidity, it seemed poured, as though it was the surface of cream and the slightest touch would create smooth ripples. Where shadows pooled harshly in his sharp, angular features, they came in deep blue hues - to match the attic’s light, perhaps. They might have looked like the strokes of a paintbrush, but no paintbrush could leave behind a canvas so void of flaws. Towards the neckline of his jumper, the ghost’s neck seemed to hold unnatural shadows that blossomed around his throat; closer inspection revealed them as severe and ugly bruising. His hair hung imperfectly to his shoulders; still and dark, its straight strands were betrayed by messy ribbons that Dominic itched to put right with his fingertips - to sweep that one stray lock behind the ghost’s ear, or to smooth that tangle laying over his shoulder.    


  
Reaching up hesitantly, Dominic waited for a flinch that never came and ran the pad of his thumb ever-so-slowly down the side of one of Matthew’s cheeks. There was no connection, no contact, but he felt the heat blossom down his thumb. He repeated the movement, and when Matthew’s lips seemed to part with appreciation, he did it again.   


  
Long, dark lashes swept down in a blink and Matthew looked at his feet, stunned by the intimacy of the moment, another timid smile gracing his lips. They were dark lips - blue lips, ever so small and slim - and when Matthew’s eyes rose again to meet Dominic’s, they were smiling too.   


“Hello,” Dominic breathed, giggling softly, and his heart caught in his chest when Matthew’s whole face broke into a grin. It was still shy but it wouldn’t leave; he saw the ghost trying to make it smaller, but he couldn’t rein it in. When he reluctantly lowered his hand, Matthew barely waited a moment before raising his own, spreading his fingers flat and pressing his palm into the very centre of Dominic’s chest. Heat soaked through his sternum - the skin, the muscles, the bone, and the organs beneath them - and Dominic’s eyes slid shut to properly enjoy the bliss steadily spreading through his core. 

  
“Oh my god,” he murmured, and cracked one eye open to see Matthew’s pale face crinkle up with amusement, spreading out a second hand and laying that one directly over Dominic’s heart. It was like hot water had been poured over the left side of his chest; he sighed, tilting his head back and with a slow, easy smile spreading over his face. Perhaps he was caught in a trance - relaxation like this didn’t find him in the presence of _anyone_ , let alone a stranger - but the slender heat blossoming across his whole torso was difficult not to sink into, and his surrender to the sensation was not twinned with the familiar prickling of self-consciousness. “That feels so nice. It’s cold in here at night.”   


Biting his lip with a shy smile, Matthew withdrew his hands and pointed to the bed, careful to keep his hand in a beam of light. A shadow from the window-frame fell across his forearm; a chunk of it fell away, leaving his wrist hanging as though suspended by invisible strings. Dominic ignored the eerie image and followed that slim finger to sit on the edge of his bed.

  
His head tilted to look up crookedly at the ghost, questioning him - Matthew put both his palms together to one side of his head and mimed sleep.   


  
“Hang on, gotta do my teeth,” Dominic muttered to himself, and hopped up to the bathroom. When he returned, he thought Matthew had disappeared, but then a skinny hand waved back and forth through the window’s light, revealing its owner’s position beside his bed.   


  
Dominic climbed into bed, curled up into a tight ball on his side and tugged the freezing sheets around himself. His pyjamas were, at least, skin-warmth. He had just stilled his fidgeting and the room had gone silent when the warmth started.   


  
He giggled at the slide of handprints trailing up his back, curling over his shoulders and banishing the chill. Squirming a little, he settled into the new heat. Matthew’s hands crept around to his chest and they stroked up and down; Dominic could feel the paths they traced below the grey cotton t-shirt he wore to sleep, and even dared uncurl his legs due to the heat tangling around and between them. His shivering breaths evened out. It was difficult to tell where the ghost exactly lay, but he could make a guess, and lay his hand where he hoped it was resting in Matthew’s.   


  
“Thankyou,” he whispered.   


  
The warmth swelled and then cooled back again - Dominic could only imagine it was the heat equivalent of applying pressure, and smiled at the thought of a hug. His eyes were closed when he heard a tiny voice.   


  
“Goodnight, Dominic.”   


  
His heart soared; he grinned into the pillow.    


  
“You… speak?”   


  
Matthew’s smile was invisible, buried in Dominic’s neck.    


  
“Very shy,” he breathed, and that was the last the boy heard of him for the night.   



	4. Rope Swing

Peeking out at the sunlit room from the cocoon of his blankets, Dominic’s eyelids drooped heavily into a slow blink before he registered that he wasn’t waking up cold, for a change.

  
“Morning,” he mumbled into the blankets, and stuck one hand out to find part of the ghost’s warmth.

  
Matthew’s arm stretched out to meet it, invisible, and - had their bodies shared a dimension - their fingers might have easily tangled together on the mattress. They lingered like that for a while before Dominic pushed himself out of bed. Within seconds his skin prickled at the cold; he hugged his arms to his chest while fishing through his open suitcase with one pointed toe to find something to wear.

  
It occurred to him that Matthew had probably been in the room throughout the last few days, and his eyes widened a little as he mentally backtracked, trying to remember anything especially embarrassing or stupid he might have done since his arrival. There didn’t seem to be an awful lot, he thought - aside from his freak-outs, but Matthew brought him such comfort that he felt surprisingly little shame in that. It was then that he realised that his feelings surpassed mere curiosity and that his thoughts were driven by compassion – a strange but genuine desire to discover parts of the ghost than ran deeper than his physical state and the laws of his existence. Memories of those dark bruises around his neck, for example, filled him with dismay and sympathy rather than horror, or a need to know how they had happened. Besides, he could very well guess how a dead person might acquire injuries that would match those.

  
Matthew was in the sunlight when he returned - he stood almost sheepishly, twitching and smiling. 

  
“Are you going to the swing again today?”

  
The ghost’s skin was luminescent; like sunlight on a lake, he appeared to shimmer with movement and Dominic’s pupils shrank uncomfortably to pinpricks. Blinking back water and scratching the back of his neck, he came closer. It was the longest sentence he’d had from Matthew, and he could see the anxiety in the ghost’s eyes - as though approaching a frightened animal, he was determined to offer friendship.

  
“Yeah, I guess. How d’you-”

  
Matthew twisted and pointed out the window, his smile thin-lipped and wide.

  
“Oh.”

  
“I saw you,” he mumbled, and his hands curled back in to his sides, fingers screwing up nervously. “Watched. Is that okay?”

  
“Of course,” Dominic lay one palm across Matthew’s cheek, watching the way the light played over his skin. “I don’t mind.”

  
“Could I come with you today?”

  
“I’d really like that,” the boy answered quickly with a wide smile, firmly squashing Matthew’s fear of rejection before it could even flare up, and the ghost’s eyes crinkled with happiness. “Let me get my coat and shoes and some food, and we can go straight away.”

  
“Okay,” he nodded enthusiastically; awkwardly. “Um, I’ll meet you in the shade on the patio?”

  
“How are you going to get downstairs without my mum and dad seeing?”

  
Without a word, Matthew’s arms lifted out to the sides and he toppled backwards through the window and the wall.

  
Dominic’s fingers hung, stunned, in the space that the ghost’s face had left behind. 

  
_Right, then._   


  
Blinking, he peered out the window. It was all shade down there; the patio was shrouded in the shadow of part of the building in the very early morning light, and he lowered his hand.

  
Sock-clad feet slipped and skidded around the corner to the kitchen as Dominic swept his coat off its hook. A brief sweep of the cupboards yielded very little, but he shoved a packet of crisps into his pocket before tying his shoes and walking to the back door.

  
“Dominic?”

  
His hand paused on the handle, head whipping to face the voice. His mother stood behind him.

  
“Morning,” he chirped, and did his best to hastily push through the door, but she was too fast for him.

  
“I wondered when you’d be coming down,” her hand gripped his shoulder, “and don’t even think about running off again - we’re going back into the village, and it’s about time you finally had a look around.”

  
“I want to go for a walk,” he frowned at the floor, trying to tug his shoulder away in vain. “Got a headache. Fresh air might help.”

  
“Walk in the village with us, then.”

  
“On my _own,”_ he rolled his eyes, scuffing the floor with the soles of his boots.

  
“It’s always _‘on my own’,”_ she scolded with a playful, teasing edge that served only to annoy him. “It’s not good for you, Dominic. The whole _point_ of moving was to surround yourself with new people, better choices, a _community-”_  


  
“I’ll meet people at school,” he mumbled to the doormat.

  
“You can’t wait until term starts,” she laughed lightly, “that’s a whole five - _six!_ \- months of sitting around! It’s not _healthy!_ You should be getting a job, or joining a club-”

  
“I don’t _want_ to join a club-”

“How about a sports club? There’s a rowing club up and down the river that meets at the Scouts Hut on Mondays and Fridays - that might at least fill some of your week. And then at weekends you can help at church-”

  
“I don’t want to meet any god damned people!” he argued, exasperated, pushing at the back door and shrugging her away. “I don’t _need_ anyone, I don’t _like-”_  


  
She reared up in his mind, venomous, her eyes in slits and talons tight on his shoulder. “You will watch your language, Dominic.”

  
“Oh my God, _sod off-”_  


  
He shoved her away just as his father rushed into the room; with his mother distracted, Dominic ignored his dad’s shout and snatched the chance to open the back door and storm out. Fear and guilt was spiralling up in his gut - it was very rare for him to lash out like that.

  
With the adrenaline manifesting itself in panic, he chewed frantically on one thumbnail as he made his way to the edge of the shade. A single hand hung delicately in the air, its fingers playing like the breeze - slow, swaying - and as Dominic approached it, a sliver of Matthew’s face appeared above it in the light. An eye, and a fluttering of hair; one corner of a smile twitched up towards a white cheek.

  
Brushing off his scared expression, he jogged the last few steps and took the ghost’s hand in greeting, prompting a little giggle. Matthew’s figure emerged, gloriously sunlit, from the shadow of the house, and they started up towards the crest of the hill.

  
Their joined hands were only so in the sense that they occupied the same space between them. Though the air was cold, heat flooded up Dominic’s arm from where their fingers had contact, and he thought it only appropriate that a gesture of affection should have an effect so tangible. Intimacy was an alien concept to him - he had little to no experience of gentle touches, even from parents - and wondered, in that moment, if normal people felt the same ghostly heat at the touch of a lover.

  
Letting his eyes drift to look sideways, he took in the sight of Matthew in the sunshine, and couldn’t escape the idea that he might be made of light. It radiated hotly from the surface of his skin, creamy-gold. Ribbons of it tangled amongst his hair. The grass beneath his footsteps steamed slightly behind them, and Dominic watched the way that his bare feet brushed dewdrops from cold green stems as they passed.    


  
“Are you okay?”

  
Matthew’s question jolted Dominic’s gaze upwards to meet concerned eyes and a hesitant smile.

  
“I…” he bit back a lie, “will be.”

  
“So you’re not.”

  
“I am!” he answered, struggling, pulling an uncomfortable face at the tree on the hill as they approached it. “It’s just a stupid argument with parents. I just don’t… I didn’t expect it to get that bad. Maybe it just threw me a bit. But I’m fine, I’m great,” he faked a smile, “it’s not like something’s really wrong. And they’re always telling me to get used to that – stay positive, keep saying I’m okay, and one day I will be. You know? How you can just… fix things with a bit of optimism? Like that woman who wished away cancer. And… and making your own luck, and things?”

  
He only realised that he’d been rambling when he stopped, and the sound of silence stretching between their footsteps took over. His words echoed in his own ears, sounding stupid. Dominic flashed the fake smile again and found something very interesting to look at on another hillside. Matthew was staring blankly.

  
“You are literally the opposite of okay.”

  
“Yeah,” he laughed, slightly hysterically. “Yeah.”

  
The heat in his hand flared again as Matthew squeezed it. “Ahh, don’t worry about it,” he let out a little snort of nervous laughter, “no one ever is.”

  
“You too, then?”

  
“Dominic, I’m _dead_ ,” he said flatly.

  
They reached the tree; brushing raindrops off the tyre swing with the flat of his hand, Dominic hopped up, jamming his foot inside to clamber up onto its seat while it jittered and swung in protest. Matthew waited until he was settled before leaping up behind him, clinging deftly to the rope and falling into place. He sat exactly where Dominic sat so that their bodies overlapped, and the boy went very still.

  
“Um.”

  
“Oh. Do you want me to-“

  
“Uh-“

  
“I can move up, or down, rather-“

  
“Your guts are in my guts.”

  
Matthew burst into giggles despite his embarrassment, and twisted about to bring his head away from Dominic’s and look him in the eye. “So they are.”

  
Dominic grinned back. “This is so weird.”

  
“I can get off, honestly-“

  
“No, no no,” he shook his head, and wrapped his arms in a loop around Matthew’s image as though hugging him close, “this is really comfortable. You’re so _warm.”_  


  
“You keep saying,” the ghost snickered, wiggling his tummy. They sat side by side more than on top of each other, with the right half of Matthew’s body stuck in the left half of Dominic’s.

  
“Shouldn’t you be cold? In all the ghost stories, the ghosts are cold.”

  
Matthew pulled a face. “They’re also creepy and they talk in Ye Oldy Englishy. No-one talks like that anymore.”

  
“They don’t?”

  
“Course not. Language isn’t like evolution. People aren’t born into a certain mutation of language and stick with it until they die. We’re always picking up new phrases here and there. If you’re conscious enough to speak, you’re conscious enough to naturally adopt modern language as it grows, you know?” He looked away to the hills, hair fluttering across his face for a moment. “Or… something.”

  
Dominic watched him with rapt interest, noting the new confidence and excitement behind the way he spoke and the way he moved. It seemed like his natural state, as though this was a sliver of his personality that wasn't weighed down by shyess. He took advantage of Matthew’s distraction to take in more of the ghost’s appearance in the full sunlight. He was particularly fascinated by Matthew’s hands where they were coiled around the damp rope of the swing; more steam hissed faintly between his slim fingers, rising presumably from where the ghost’s heat met cold dew. His clothes were also more visible now; they were simple - he wore just jeans and a sweater, both baggy and dark grey. Bare feet. The sweater’s neck had been ripped wider, so that it framed both collarbones and hung down a few inches below his throat. Little frayed ends splayed raggedly across porcelain skin where it had begun to unravel. At his sleeves, holes had been cut for his thumbs, and Dominic noticed that the fabric gathered in his palms as a result was worried and crinkled from constant playing and fretting. Looking back up, the low cut of the neck exposed the bruising more than ever, and he held back from gently touching his fingertips to it.

  
“Tell me more about ghosts,” he said, and Matthew’s eyes came back across to look at him.

  
“Okay,” he said crookedly, looking shy again. “Um, what kind of things?”

  
“I don’t know, how many are there?”

  
“Oh, god, a lot,” he replied. “Like, it’s not hard to come back as one. All you need is to die with some kind of will to stick around.”

  
Dominic’s eyes were wide. “That’s it?”

  
“Yeah, that’s literally it,” Matthew nodded, sniggering at the boy’s incredulous expression. “I know, right? So, there you go. That’s the easy bit. There are millions and millions of us. The only people who don’t make it in are the ones who peacefully accept their death, or whatever,” his grin spread even wider, “and you know who that includes?”

  
“Who?”

  
“People who believe in an afterlife,” he cackled, throwing his head back and grinning madly at the tree above the swing. “I love the universe.”

  
Dominic’s own disbelieving laughter joined in, floating through the branches of the tree, and a gust of wind blew leaves through the air around them.

  
“So, religious people hardly get in,” Matthew continued, composing himself, “and neither do all of the suicides, obviously. Old people too; we don’t have many wise old ghosts. Or drownings. Drownings are weird, actually,” he said thoughtfully, “because people seem to hit a moment of peacefulness right before they kick it, and they all miss out. It’s wicked when one gets through though, because they drip water forever and dribble a lot when they talk.”

  
“Nice.”

  
“Anyway, so you need some will to stay behind, and a bit of that can be the clichéd old ‘unfinished business’ thing, but sometimes it’s just pure emotion. Pure fear, or love for someone still living, or anger. My favourites are the ones that don’t think they’re about to go – they’re just crossing the street to buy a sandwich or something, they get hit by a truck, and their oblivious desire to buy a sandwich is literally the only thing on their minds and so they get in,” he giggled, delighted that Dominic was laughing too. “So weird. But yeah, centuries and centuries ago, I think there were a lot of problems with new ghosts, and all those raw emotions and all that confusion. So now we elect guardian angels who act as protectors and mentors for a few years, until new ghosts find their feet.”

  
“Are you a new ghost?”

  
Matthew’s smile faltered a little but he nodded. “Brand new, like, I’m only a few months old. I died last winter,” he tapped his throat with one finger. “Was just trying to get away from my father, that’s all.”

  
Without hesitation this time, Dominic reached up his hand to touch the purple blotches, his thumb quietly running the curve of them where a rope had clearly bitten deep. 

  
“Your family must have been the ones living here before mine,” he murmured, still gently touching the ghost’s throat and watching the wide, bright eyes mere inches from his own. “They said it was on the market a while.”

  
“By the time he got to me I was gone,” Matthew said quietly, “but I was hidden, watching down – him standing there with a cricket bat, and then going to my room up in that attic, and putting it down under my bed. Then he waited a few minutes before calling the emergency services and practiced his best distraught face in the bathroom mirror. I stuck around out of fear and anger,” he shrugged, the vague smile not really leaving his face through the whole story. “They were the ones that kept me here.”

  
“Brand new little ghost,” Dominic said softly, and nuzzled into the warm, empty space of his neck. “I’m so sorry. You must have been terrified.”

  
“Only until I met with my guardian angel, and then the mentoring did me a lot of good. I came back down soon as he considered me stable,” Matthew closed his eyes and let his nose rest in the top of Dominic’s hair. “Then I was just a little bit lonely, that’s all.”

  
“A little-bit-very lonely?”

  
“Hmm,” he hummed with agreement. “There were others, even some our age, but I didn’t speak to anyone before you.”

  
Dominic’s lips quirked in a lopsided little smile. “Should I be flattered?”

  
“Or creeped out,” Matthew suggested, mumbling.

  
“Nah, that’s not how it feels,” the boy reassured him, “I don’t know why, but you make me feel really… comfortable.”

  
“I watched,” the ghost said, “every time you tried to comfort yourself. I know what loneliness looks like. I realised I needed someone who would get it, you know? Or I’d be a freak. Feel like a freak, at least.” He paused to frown. “Hope that doesn’t make _you_ feel like a freak.”

  
“I know I am,” Dominic shook his head, “and that’s okay.”

  
“No,” Matthew said bluntly. 

  
“Yep,” he pushed up the sleeves of his coat, showing Matthew the forearms underneath. They were peppered with marks where his fingernails had dug in and picked away at his skin unconsciously; fresh cuts were layered upon scabs upon scars. “I don’t even notice,” Dominic showed his bloodstained, bitten fingernails, “it just happens when I’m not paying attention. And I can’t make friends. And everyone – even my parents – says I’m a freak because of the… way I am,” he finished, lamely. “See. There’s obviously something plain _wrong_ about me.”

  
“Hey, me too then,” the ghost chirped, jumping out of the swing and reaching up as though to lift Dominic down to the ground with him. “Come on, let’s go for a walk, I haven’t been out in the sun for weeks and weeks. And I promise to tell you more ghost stories.”


	5. Rope Swing

“You can’t.”

  
“We _have!”_ his father exclaimed for the third time. Dominic seethed in his mother’s arms, leaning slightly away from her soft sniffling against his hair. They sat on the edge of his bed, with cold grey light filtering through the window panes. It hadn’t quite been bright enough to light Matthew beyond a blurred form hanging in the pale air, but Dominic’s chest was still tight from panic when he’d had to shove the ghost into a dark corner as his parents had opened the door. Which he had forgotten to lock. Typical.

  
“But there’s nothing _wrong_ with me! I just need time, and a bit of space and – mum, please,” he groaned, trying to push her embrace away where it was squashing him, but she held on tight.

  
“Sweetheart, I don’t want this any more than you do,” she wiped at her eyes, “and I’m so sorry. You’re just… you’re our _son_ , and we’re so worried. It’s just what we think would be best for you right now, I promise.”

  
“They have all sorts of options these days,” his father joined in. “There’s a counselling service in a couple of the bigger towns, and there’s always medication-”

  
“Sure,” he sneered, “just dope me up, that’ll fix all your problems. It’ll certainly make me easier to keep an eye on-“

  
A sudden, sharp pain flared in his arm and his sentence fell away. Looking down, Dominic noticed a red spot flaring on the pale grey sleeve of his top, and pushed it back to see that he’d opened up another new cut with his anxious picking. Before he could snatch it away, his mother had pushed back the sleeve.

  
He winced and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the screaming and shouting, but it never came. Instead, the bed shifted beneath him and he heard her footsteps rushing from the room, and a helpless sob from halfway down the stairs.

  
“Dominic,” his father sighed heavily, “you should have told us-“

  
“Evidently not?!” he said loudly and slightly hysterically, gesturing to the stairs down which his mother had just escaped.

  
“-she’s just upset,” he explained calmly. “She’s really sorry for shouting at you yesterday, too. Look, the doctor will come up tomorrow morning, and we’ll see what he can suggest. If that doesn’t work out, though, then perhaps we were wrong. All this solitude probably isn’t doing you any good. Maybe you’d be better off back in the city after all.” He paused. “I pray for you every night.”

  
With that, he turned and left the attic, thoughtfully closing the door behind himself and leaving Dominic in silence again.

  
“You can’t leave me,” came a tiny voice from the corner.

  
“I don’t know what to do,” Dominic whispered, still staring at the back of the door where his father had disappeared. 

  
“We’ll figure it out,” Matthew emerged in the space before the window, looking blurred and greyer than usual; the only thing to light him was the overcast sky. He knelt at Dominic’s feet and gazed hopefully up at the other boy. “We will, I promise.”

  
“I don’t want pills.“

  
“I know.“

  
Dominic took in a deep breath and it came out shivery; he curled his knees up to his chest and hugged them. His eyes filled up with sudden, scared tears. Down by his feet, he noticed Matthew sweep up to his side, and by the time he had started to cry then the ghost was already folded around him, sitting in his lap, both legs around his waist. His weightless presence wrapped itself about his body and heated in that way that Matthew seemed to prefer when demonstrating affection – it swelled and faded in turn, like a squeeze that gradually relented and then glowed harder again. Long ghost hands were running hot paths over and over the back of Dominic’s neck, like water trickling through the lengths of his hair.

  
“Don’t cry, Dom,” Matthew murmured, his lips rushing up and down Dominic’s neck and ear as he curled even tighter around the boy. 

  
“It’s stupid,” he cried, the sound ugly and petulant in his own ears. “It’s so unfair. It’s just when I feel like I might have found a safe place, and a safe person, and a way to-“

  
“Shh, it’ll be okay,” he hushed back, warmth blossoming from each of his fingertips and soothing Dominic’s spine. It shivered. His heart broke at the way that Dominic was so desperate to hug him that his arms were constantly squeezing too hard – they slipped through the space that Matthew’s chest should have occupied, instead bumping sadly against Dominic’s own body again. “I could move. You know, to the city. We could work something out.”

  
“You’d have to leave your guardian angel,” he said sadly, “and you couldn’t hide like you can out here-“ 

  
“It’d just be a transfer to one of the angels in the city.”

  
“You _love_ your angel,” Dominic shook his head. He brushed off fresh tears. “You couldn’t hide away so easy; you’d never be able to go out in sunlight. You’d be so unhappy, Matthew.”

  
Sighing out a soft breath, Matthew held himself as though resting his chin on the boy’s shoulder, lips against his neck, and the warmth of that breath tingled on Dominic’s skin. 

  
“I’m sorry but you know it’s true,” he apologised, and exhaled shakily. “God. I just… I just need a hug.”

  
“Well, I’m _trying_.”

  
It was just a tease, but it seemed to set Dominic off again. “I didn’t – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-“

  
“Hey, easy,” Matthew murmured into his cheek, stroking a long, stray part of Dominic’s hair back behind one ear. The blond fell quiet, his head hanging. “I… there might be something we can do about that.”

  
“Yeah?” Dominic sniffled blearily, balling his sleeve up in one fist and wiping his wet cheeks with a little choke of a laugh. “What, jump off the roof? Meet you down there?”

  
“Don’t be thick,” Matthew scolded gently. “It’s not going to be real contact, but it’s something. A little bit more.” His nose grazed Dominic’s jaw and he shifted in the boy’s lap, insistently pouring heat into the body beneath him. “And I think we both need a little bit more from each other.”

  
“Yes,” came a wistful sigh. It was followed by a little cough. “I mean, yeah,” Dominic said in a much deeper voice, but Matthew was already snickering with amusement.

  
“Okay. We need to bring about a bit of a… uh… a change of state, sort of.”

  
“All… right.”

  
Matthew leaned back a little bit, breaking most of their contact in favour of making shapes with his hands. “I’m just a bit of energy in the air, heating things up, moving things about, playing with molecules. Molecules in a solid are so… so rigid, and sticky. It’s like trying to tug magnets apart. Totally knackering. No one bothers with fine manipulation of solids. Why do you think ghosts have always appeared as gas forms? Much easier.” He chewed his lip, gesturing between the two of them. “Though that does present the issue at hand,” he finished.

  
“Hmm,” Dominic smiled weakly, trailing his fingers in a lazy ‘S’ through Matthew’s chest.

  
“In liquids, there’s a middle ground of sorts,” Matthew said, and the fingers recoiled as Dominic eyed him. 

  
“Are you saying we should, like,” his eyes searched back and forth across Matthew’s face, “go… swimming?”

  
The ghost giggled down at his lap. “No, it’s okay, it doesn’t need to be that, um, wet,” he explained. “We just need to use your shower.”

  
“Oh.” Dominic prayed his blush wouldn’t show. “I… um-“

  
“You don’t have to be naked if you don’t want,” Matthew blurted out; he winced at the sentence, like it hadn’t come out quite the way he’d wanted. “I mean, you can have things on. Clothes. Wearing them.”

  
“Cool,” he answered. “Great. Well, not great, just, you know, that… gives me less to be shy about.” Dominic cleared his throat. “And uh… what about you?”

  
“Oh, clothes are just a matter of imagination for me,” he chirped happily, “check it out.”

  
A huge, excessively flamboyant hat appeared on Matthew’s head in the blink of an eye. Colossal and lurid pink, it was adorned with a full garland of flowers and a cascade of peacock feathers. The ghost’s face below it was utterly blank and impassive. He shrugged.

  
“Get in the bathroom,” Dominic told him.

*

  
Lit from a scattering of candles that stood on every available surface - per Matthew’s instruction - the tiles of the bathroom flickered a soft orange as Dominic leaned into the shower to switch on the hot water. It spattered his sleeve before he could pull away; the candlelight filtered through the cascade, sending it glittering as it poured onto the floor and blossomed upwards in pale steam clouds.

  
“This is stupid, they won’t dry for days,” Dominic snorted, looking up at the running shower and then down at his clothes. He pulled up his t-shirt over his head and dropped it to the floor, followed by his trousers; the candle fluttered worriedly as they landed.

  
“Better?”

  
“Much,” he answered, and stepped into the shower in just his boxers.

  
Matthew padded into the room while chewing at the sleeve of his jumper – a habit that rather detracted from the majesty of a ghost in full firelight, but one that Dominic met with a wide, helplessly charmed smile. Melting soundlessly through the glass door as though it wasn’t there, he slipped into the shower and Dominic stood aside to let him into the water.

  
At first, Matthew took the stream to the back of his bowed head, squinting and letting the water brush his hair into one solid, black, silky curtain that hung around his face, but then he threw it back with one hand and angled his screwed-up face into the water. It didn’t fall through him, but didn’t run off either; it clung for a few inches to the planes of his skin like raindrops to leaves – they were connected for a moment, but eventually the weight of the drop would pull through and send it tumbling to the floor. Even in such darkness, Dominic had never seen him look so real. Opaque as ever in appearance, the runnels of water trickling down his face made it hard to believe that he couldn’t stroke a fingertip through them, or lift the weight of that sodden sweater from the ghost’s skinny shoulders and over his head.

  
“Okay,” Matthew thumbed away water from his eyes, scrunching them up and blinking. With his hair plastered all the way down to his neck and his clothes hanging heavily from his bones, he rather resembled a drowned rat. “Come closer; into the water.”

  
Dominic moved in until they were just an inch apart, his hands instinctively coming up to cup Matthew’s face.

  
The sensation fascinated him. That familiar heat resonated in his fingertips, but also the water ran between their skins – it found tension between the two and, like laying a palm to the surface of a waterfall, the resulting pull made it easy to create the illusion of a solid. The ghost’s eyes flickered darkly in the candlelight, watching fat droplets wet Dominic’s lips, or weigh down his lashes only to shudder away with each blink. A long and sodden ribbon of dark blonde hair stuck to his cheek.

  
“Relax,” Matthew whispered, his small lips displacing old trickles and forming new ones down his chin. “Put your arms around me. So that as much of us as possible is touching.”

  
“Do you maybe want to…?” 

  
Dominic indicated the jumper, which was not only in a very sorry state, but now presented an actual barrier between them. Matthew’s gaze dropped.

  
“Yes,” he answered.

  
“Then...?” he tailed off, one corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “It’s okay, my nipples are weird too. Everyone’s are. Nipples are crazy.”

  
The ghost looked up, but he only looked amused for a moment before switching back to anxious. A candle outside flickered and threw shadows across their faces. “There are things you don’t want to see,” he muttered, brushing away a drop that clinged to the tip of his nose. “I don’t even look at them myself, to be honest.”

  
“I don’t have to see, not if you don’t want me to,” Dominic told him, “I really wouldn’t stare. But it’s okay, honest.”

  
Matthew pouted, but then his soaked jumper appeared to melt off his frame, pouring away with the shower water, and revealed a pitifully thin and severely bruised body. Dominic’s breath shrank up in his lungs at the sight of it. He could see where the most serious blows had been struck; the injuries over the chest must have broken ribs, especially to one side of his sternum, where the bruising was black and the skin had once been split from blunt force.

  
“You didn’t give me time to not look,” he said softly; hollowly.

  
“You’re not looking away,” Matthew noted, hugging his arms to himself. “Do you hate it?”

  
“I want to hold you.”

  
The water hammered between them, still dancing with warm light, and Matthew leaned forward to curl up against Dominic’s body. Their chests pressed together, bruises aligning. It still wasn’t solid. Like oil against water, there was a strange, liquid definition, but it was hard to touch or measure.

  
“Does it hurt?”

  
“No.”

  
Dominic tried to press himself closer. He tried to wrap his arms around Matthew’s back, every inch of his skin perfectly placed against the ghost’s - with no overlap, so their bodies touched like human bodies do. 

  
“I almost feel you.”

  
Dominic felt Matthew’s lips brush those words against his shoulder, like warm water slipping around the syllables and down his skin.

  
“Closer,” the ghost demanded, voice husky and soft.

  
His body itched to feel resistance; he ached for Matthew, his weight, his pressure, the angles of their bodies clashing – but as he closed his embrace, the little contact he had melted away.

  
“Slower,” Matthew giggled.

  
They reverted to that original, tantalising brush. Dominic’s breath came shakily against Matthew’s neck. His body was raising gooseflesh even though steam was rising up around them, and he could feel the stiffness of Matthew’s nipples against his chest, not so far from his own. 

  
“Find my edges,” the ghost uttered, “learn their shape, learn the places where water changes state. Close your eyes and know them.”

  
They swayed slowly against each other, eyes lowered, hands trailing in tentative explorations between currents of dark steam. Dominic imagined each drop hitting their skins as a cascade of glass beads, and then tried to imagine those beads as stationary objects that were being gently pressed into his skin. To simply imagine the water as a solid. He shut his eyes and traced his fingertips up the back of Matthew’s neck, and they both shuddered.

  
“I – I felt-“

  
“Again,” Matthew said urgently, hopefully.

  
His fingertips skated that hard, bony neck again, and when the ghost arched up into his touch, their skins didn’t slip through. Dominic’s lips parted with shock. Like surface tension on water, he seemed to find an invisible frequency in the air – a charge; a signal – as though twisting the dial of a radio and stumbling across a station. 

  
It had a scent and he named it Matthew.

  
“That’s it,” the ghost’s whisper cracked with emotion. His head tilted back and unspeakable bliss slipped across his features, soft but pained. “That’s me, Dom.”

  
Mouth too slack for words, Dominic let that scent crackle up his arms until he could take the other boy in their first embrace. Tentative at first – for fear of pressing too hard, and having the ghost dissolve at his fingertips – the hug soon gained confidence, and their craving outweighed their hesitance. Matthew whined with impatience and began desperately snuggling into Dominic’s chest. 

  
“Hello,” Dominic gasped, giggling. His arms folded around narrow, hard little shoulders. His face buried in Matthew’s soaking hair. Following the dark, straight fall of it, Dominic settled his nose in the crook of his neck and settled there, savouring his touch, his scent on the air; the tangibility of him.

  
“Oh my god,” whispered Matthew, again and again, his lips grazing the bruise-stained skin of his collarbone.

  
The air crackled with damp heat, swirling across his skin in soft swathes of steam as Matthew’s lips and fingertips skated and explored. Dominic’s mind swam. His eyes closed and he began to feel a deep, silky excitement coil up around his tummy. Their intimacy was feverish and innocent all at once, and he wasn’t sure where neck became jaw beneath his murmuring lips, but surely it did, and as the water poured down and steam trickled up around them, Dominic found his mouth somewhere small and sweet and wet. Heart pounding harder than ever before in his life, he continued to nibble and press and suck for just a moment – just out of affection, just to linger on that soft, willing taste – before his eyes opened, dazed and delighted, to be met by Matthew’s own.

  
They were dazed too, and only looked him in the eye for a moment before they alighted heavily on Dominic’s mouth. Both felt a nagging reminder that they should be asking questions, or addressing insecurities, or making rushed apologies, but the breaths between them were far too sweet and heavy and charged. There was no room in them for doubt. Dominic’s body ached with desire and Matthew’s toes curled on the shower floor as they kissed again, and again and again. The ghost’s hands splayed and quivered against the other boy’s skin. Neither left the shower until the candles had burned low and the hot water tank was all but empty.

  



	6. Rope Swing

Dominic’s eyes screwed shut before blearily opening. His hand lay flat on the surface of the empty sheets beside him. Unable to concentrate while asleep, it had slipped through Matthew’s chest overnight, but as soon as he lifted it back up to the warm boundary of the ghost’s skin, he could begin to seek out that fragile, fluttering frequency that he had found in the air the night before. It quivered at his touch, like a droplet drawn up by tension from the surface of a puddle, and then shuddered into something slightly more tangible. His eyes were soft and sleepy as he began tracing patterns along Matthew’s ribs with the edge of his thumb. He drew along each one, sketched their angles, and explored his heartbeat beneath that warmest part of his chest.

  
“Hello,” came a voice from the empty space beside his own lips.

  
He smiled, but then it was interrupted by an angry knocking at the door and Dominic sat up with a flash of panic, the covers scrunching in his fists.

  
“Dominic?” his mother called, the flat of her hand shaking the door on its hinges. “Dominic, unlock the door, will you? The doctor’s just downstairs. He’ll be up in five minutes.”

  
“Shit,” he breathed. His toes slid down to the floor and he hunched up on the side of his bed, staring at the door like it might crash in at any moment. “Okay,” he said louder, his voice husky from sleep, “I… okay.”

  
“Are you decent?” she asked, knocking again.

  
“Just give me a moment,” he said weakly, and got to his feet. The stairs outside creaked on her way down and he exhaled as steadily as his lungs would allow him, fishing more clothes from his suitcase. As he tugged a long sleeved top over his head, he brushed the curtains aside and sunlight streamed across the pale floorboards, catching his face so that his skin glowed stark white, and his hair fell in sleep-mussed, feathery tangles. For a moment, Matthew could have sworn that Dominic looked as much like a ghost as himself, but then the boy turned around and he was back to the dark, frightful land of the living.

  
“Shit,” Dominic said again, looking to where the sunlight was illuminating Matthew’s features even from the other side of the room. He tugged the curtains shut again. “Can’t have those open. You’re lit up like a bloody Christmas tree.”

  
“I could leave?” he suggested, chewing at one of his sleeves anxiously. “While everyone else is up here?”

  
“Please don’t,” Dominic looked pale with fright, “I don’t know what to say, Matthew.”

  
“I don’t know how to help! I want to fix things, I _want_ to help, but-“

  
“I don’t need anything more than just knowing that you’re here, just – please, Matt, just hang about behind me and do your warm ghost thing.” He paused, looked up, and swallowed. “Sorry, I dunno why I just called you Matt.”

  
“I can be a Matt,” Matt smiled, rubbing his nose nervously. He shuffled closer and lifted his arms for a hug. “And, um, good morning.” 

  
Dominic curled into his embrace without question or hesitation; he thought about leaning in for more kisses, but his anxiety made it hard to find anything solid in the air. The warmth would have to be enough.

  
“Morning, Matt.”

  
“Dominic? Can you open the door?”

  
That voice was not a familiar one at all. Male, and with a trace of a regional accent, the doctor sounded quite kind. Dominic’s lip curled. He would not be fooled.

  
“One sec!”

  
“It’s too bright,” Matthew whispered, “I’m gonna be up here, on – on _this_ beam,” he pointed to one of the horizontal ceiling beams, right over their heads and Dominic’s bed. “So I’ll be just above you, I promise.”

  
“I… um, sure,” Dominic bit at one of his thumbnails and gazed up at it. The space above it was shrouded in shadow; the ghost would be easily hidden. His mother rapped her knuckles on his bedroom door. Tendrils of nausea crept up his throat.

  
“Dominic?!”

  
“Dominic, open the door for the doctor, please.”

  
“Okay, okay,” Dominic hissed, as Matthew leapt, cat-like, onto the beam. Now totally obscured from view, he crouched down on the balls of his feet and peered down anxiously to watch Dominic cross the room and open the door.

  
“Ah, hello,” the doctor held out a hand for Dominic to shake, but the boy had already turned on his heel and retreated back to the edge of his bed. Knees up to his chest, he attempted a smile.

  
“Hi.”

  
“It’s okay, Dominic, I’m just here to talk about things, alright?”

  
“Alright.” He brushed long hair behind one ear and looked at the floor. 

  
“Now, what do _you_ think the problem is?”

  
Swallowing, he continued to stare at the floor. He’d hoped for easy questions that he could bluff away, but to his dismay this one took him by surprise. He couldn’t admit anything, because then they’d figure he was on board with any treatment program they felt like giving him. And he couldn’t lie, because his parents hovered in the centre of the room, silently urging him to speak. He could feel it; he could taste their will in the air, crawling through his mouth and down into his lungs, making it harder to breathe. Dominic glanced up to the beams, but couldn’t see anyone.

  
“It’s social anxiety,” his mother eventually said, her patience out. “He might find it hard to talk about – you know, given the nature of the whole condition!”

  
The last bit of her sentence was caught on a little laugh and Dominic flinched.

  
“Well, understandable! How about you tell me about the condition instead? And Dominic, I’ll check that you agree at the end?”

  
“Perfect,” his mother agreed, and the boy forced a little nod, just to deflect away their attention from him for a moment. “Well, his whole behaviour started to change a few months ago, but he still saw a few friends.”

  
His mind reeled back into spaces and sounds from the past. They thundered in his ears.

  
“Now he doesn’t see anyone. He hasn’t got any friends.”

  
Dominic’s head hung and his hair fell over his face, blocking out stripes of the room, but not the ones that mattered; the doctor could still see him.

  
“He was bullied, a bit, I think? At his old school.”

  
His chest seized up and twitched inside.

  
“We moved him here to give him a fresh start-“

  
He buried his face in his hands.

  
“-but he hasn’t even _tried_ to make the most of it. Something must be wrong. Dominic, love, look up.”

  
The doctor threw her a concerned glance and leaned in a little closer to Dominic, gently laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Dominic? Say that again?”

  
A sob burst from his lips.

  
“What?”

  
“He’s saying something,” the doctor said, shooting her with a look that she could have sworn was laced with disapproval. “Could you give me some time alone with him? Your son needs a moment.”

  
Dominic breathed two words into his hands.

  
“What was that? Dominic?”

  
“Help – me-”

  
Stuttering with his breaths, the words were met with silence, and the doctor’s hand squeezed where it was resting on Dominic’s shoulder.

  
“It’s okay, that’s what we’re going to do,” he said softly. “We can help, we’re just deciding what kind of approach to try first. We’re going to-“

  
His voice cut out abruptly. Dominic looked up despite himself; tears streaked his cheeks. And then the doctor’s face twisted up and a serrated scream tore the air.

  
Leaping off the bed and away from the man – who had sunk to the floorboards and was curled up, clutching at his face – Dominic staggered away backwards. His parents were yelling as well, both rushing forward, until all he could see of the doctor was thrashing limbs and a twisting, contorted torso. The noise and the panic soaked the air, along with something else – a soft, sinister hissing.

  
The screams buckled in on themselves and came back twice as terrified. Stumbling away from the bed, the man writhed and crawled towards the door. Dominic jumped out of his path. He just saw a flash of the man’s face, wreathed in pale air. It was branded and burned, blistering and sizzling, in the shape of two handprints.

  
His own hands covered his mouth, but the wave of shock and sickness that he’d expected didn’t come. His parents ran from the room, buffeting past him. He heard his mother praying. Dominic’s father shot him a lingering look and then slammed the bedroom door shut, this time locking it from the outside.

  
“Oh my god,” he whispered aloud, and suddenly Matthew was on him; around him. Dominic could feel intense, passionate affection in every breath of him. 

  
“I’m so sorry,” the ghost breathed, and he sounded as though he were about to cry. “I don’t – I don’t know, I don’t know what I thought, I just had to… had to do _something_ and you asked me for help and – I didn’t mean to really hurt, I _promise_ , Dom-“

  
He didn’t want to talk. He couldn’t bear the sound of Matthew’s desperate, distraught guilt. Relief, at least, fell over him in the knowledge that however twisted his method, Matthew had bought them a little more time alone.

  
“I’m glad you did it,” he said, voice cracking. Matthew fell quiet. “It was horrible but it’s done and it’s – it’s done. It’s done, they’re gone. It’s done.”

  
“Okay,” he said shakily, nervously touching Dominic’s arms and taking his wrists, “but they knew, Dom, they _knew_ something did that.”

  
“They… I don’t know, they might think it was something else!”

  
“Your mother was praying.”

  
Dominic lowered his eyes.

  
“Your mother was praying and she knew what I was. And I know what happens next, they’re going to call a preacher, and,” Matthew’s eyes searched all over the space in front of him and his voice faltered, “I don’t know. I only know stories. But, you know, they’re not nice stories.”

  
Dominic crooked two fingers and lifted Matthew’s chin with them, coaxing him closer. 

  
“I’m not going to let them do anything to you,” he promised. His voice sounded an awful lot darker and an awful lot firmer than it felt. “I swear, Matthew. I haven’t got a thing to lose. I don’t care anymore. If we have to run, we’ll run.”

  
“Run?” Matthew giggled through his tears, resting his forehead so that it touched Dominic’s. They found each other like magnets, melting together. “Run where? Run how?”

  
“Run away,” Dominic murmured, “just take off and leave. All around the world. Away from everything.”

  
“Find a circus,” he suggested, and Dominic grinned, “travel with them – you can have like a psychic act. Talking to the dead. I can be, like, your messenger that you send off to the underworld. Bringing back messages and stuff. We’d make a bloody fortune.”

  
“Or you could work as the ultimate assassin,” he answered, and Matthew’s smile brushed against his own in the slightest slip of a kiss. “Creep into the room in the dead of night through the wall. No fingerprints, no trace of ever having been in the room. People lining up to be the highest bidder, you’d be unstoppable.”

  
“Don’t you think people would get upset?” the ghost breathed. Their mouths touched again.

  
“Sure, because being dead is _such_ a big deal,” Dominic barely uttered, and their next kiss was sweet and deep.

  
The taste of Matthew – and the touch of him, which was becoming ever easier to seek – was at once as delicate and vulnerable as it was his reassurance. Dominic’s arms closed protectively around his tiny frame and held it tight. It made him feel better. Somewhere between their mouths – within that hushed and fluttering exchange of breath – the tension in their lungs slid away. It felt as though his entire world was in his hands and at his lips; this small, fragile, precarious universe that hung on the air and only showed in shafts of light. It was made of the only love and the only happiness he’d ever known, or ever thought he’d need to know again. His universe kissed him again and his insides tumbled and heated along with his pulse. 

  
And so when, between kisses, Matthew said: “Dom, if I loved you, what would you do?” then the first words out of his mouth were “I’d still love you.”

  
The ghost snorted with surprise into his mouth and their faces fell gracelessly through each other as he stumbled, losing both balance and concentration. Righting himself, he began to apologise and let out an awkward, embarrassed giggle when Dominic seized his shoulders straight out of the air and fixed him beneath a look, the intensity of which was well beyond his years.

  
“I love you,” he said, almost angrily. “And I would do anything to protect you. Kill for you, or die for you, and I don’t much care which it ends up being.”

  
Matthew’s giggle had died on his lips, and now was caught there in a curious twist where the impact of Dominic’s words had frozen it solid. 

  
“And you’re… you’re not messing around?”

  
His head shook.

  
“What about your parents?”

  
“I don’t care,” he said shortly. “They’ve had fifteen years to make me care.”

  
Eyes sadly downcast, Matthew tangled his fingers with Dominic’s at their sides, and he leaned in to kiss the other boy’s cheek. Tiny warmth blossomed and faded on that pale skin. For a moment the ghost’s lips parted and then closed, accompanied by a small frown as he struggled with how to respond.

  
“Are we sort of boyfriends?”

  
All Dominic could do was nod and kiss again, sealing their mouths and wrapping his arms around Matthew’s shoulders. His heart was hammering. Part of him – the last giddy, teenage part of him to survive – was internally bouncing up and down with delighted disbelief, but it was a small part, and the rest of him ached. His skin itched. His stomach twisted. Even though Matthew was growing ever easier and more familiar to seek out in the air, to touch him was to touch little more than a curtain of silk. He always fell through; always crumbled. It was nothing compared to the connection that they had experienced the night before. Dominic was about to break the kiss to say something when Matthew interrupted him.

  
“Do you maybe want to get back in the shower?” he asked.

*

  
Water poured between their kisses and Matthew squeaked, his stomach flipping as he felt Dominic’s skin slipping against his again. Any innocence and hesitance present in their actions last night had been conquered by anxiety, and the urgent passion left in its wake. The ghost’s whole body gleamed, naked and pale and streaming with heavy rivers from the shower – at first, they had laid eyes on each other shyly, but each touch had come with fewer and fewer trembles until they were pressed together, shivery and aroused. Dominic’s cock felt heavy – not yet stiffening, but hanging in that thick, warm state that he knew normally meant he had mere moments to find a tissue and a locked door. One of his hands cupped the base of Matthew’s neck and the other cupped the curve of his arse. It was gently massaging the skin there, squeezing and stroking. 

  
Dipping his head, Matthew exhaled hard through his nose and lay a wet, open-mouthed kiss to the other boy’s neck. Dominic’s breath was interrupted and he gasped, shivering at the ghost’s tongue leaving soft, small stripes through every kiss. His eyes were wide over the top of Matthew’s head. A hungry groan came from the ghost’s mouth and it latched onto his exposed throat, directly over the thick vein that ran up one side, and Dominic whimpered as Matthew began to suck, hard, as though he meant to drain his life away through that delicate patch of skin. Blood rushed angrily to the surface. The stubs of the older candles flickered dangerously and for the slimmest of seconds, Matthew’s figure wavered out of the air and faded – the bruise continued to bloom below Dominic’s jaw, drawn upwards by desperate, invisible lips. His neck would hold a dark love bite by morning.

  
“Matt,” he whined, and his hips jerked forward.

  
Trapped against the wet wall, Matthew swallowed thickly and let his lips fall away, swollen. Dominic’s hands were wandering over his bum, his hips, his thighs. Letting them trail and explore, and knowing their likely destination, the ghost leaned closer and nuzzled the other boy’s chest, smiling and placing chaste, delicate kisses across the heat of his skin. His own hands curled and twitched. One skimmed downwards to caress Dominic’s abdomen, and the stream of water tumbling over it split into two.

  
His cock was half erect and it twitched when Dominic’s hand came to cup it for the first time, handling and stroking him with a firm but gentle care that made the young ghost cry out. The noise was unquestionably one of bliss, but there was a vulnerable and unsteady edge to it; it defined that wild, desperate feeling of being overwhelmed by new sensations. Instinctively, he touched Dominic back, coiling his fingers around his cock and squeezing. The boy’s moan rose high over the rush of the shower. 

  
“Do you,” he managed, panting, “are we… do you want to have sex?”

  
“Bit late to be asking that,” Matthew shot back, and their eyes met for a moment, sharing a quick grin before they tangled together again. His hair stuck to his face, dark and tangled. “I would love,” he mumbled, “to have sex,” his hips arched at a slow, tight stroke of Dominic’s fist, “ _oh, fuck_ \- with you. Please go on top. I really want you to be on top. Is that okay?”

  
“Open your legs a little bit,” he answered, and he swore he could have felt Matthew’s dick swell slightly against his palm.

  
Reaching around, Dominic ran his fingers between the boy’s cheeks and spread them. Matthew hissed as hot water trickled down his spine and over his opening, and then Dominic pressed two of his fingertips against it. It quivered, then relaxed, and he eased smooth, firm circles into the flushed, tight skin there.

  
“Alright?” he asked breathlessly, kissing his cheekbone. Matthew’s eyes were wide and his chest heaved as he nodded. Dominic bit his lip and inched one finger inside, curling it when it was buried all the way to his knuckle.

  
Dominic’s breath failed in his lungs as Matthew gasped, his head thrown back in rapture to rest against the shower wall. Every ivory inch of his skin was caught upon the warm light in the air; every bone, every bump of gooseflesh, every _hair_ defined exquisitely and gleaming from where the shower had soaked them. Swallowing, Dominic’s free hand came up to skate the side of Matthew’s ribcage, his fingertips trembling and mapping out each bone - from the angular curves where his hip bones jutted beneath thin skin, to the elegant, swept-back throat lined and edged with collarbone and jaw. His skin slipped, almost-there, like hot cream beneath his touch. 

  
As though sensing the divinity of the moment, the ghost lingered, his parted lips gracing the steam-clouded ceiling with a kiss. His skin shivered at the other boy’s gentle explorations. Dominic’s finger was moving in small, sweet thrusts, filling his arse and making his entire body feel weak. 

  
Joining his palm, Dominic’s mouth came to press; to worship. Matthew’s nipples stood out, dark and erect from the pleasure crackling through his chest, and Dominic brought one into his mouth to suckle greedily. It was small and hard against his tongue. Squeezing his finger out of Matthew’s body, he aligned it with his forefinger and sank them back inside, picking up a persistent, steady rhythm.

  
“ _Dominic_ ,” Matthew exhaled unsteadily, his body quivering with need.

  
Slipping his hand up to cup the back of the ghost’s neck, Dominic sucked the nipple until it was utterly swollen, fluttering his tongue over the tiny bumps around its centre until he felt Matthew unravelling in his arms. The ghost’s breaths were faltering. The sound and feel of them - hitching desperately in the chest beneath his lips - only served to drive Dominic further. 

  
“You ready? Are you okay?”

  
“So good,” was all Matthew could moan, burying his head into Dominic’s neck and pushing his hips back into his hand.

  
“Turn around,” he murmured, taking the ghost’s chin for a last kiss before guiding him to face the shower wall.

  
With a long sigh designed to compose himself, Matthew eased himself back a little into Dominic’s lap, curling up as tight to the other boy’s chest as possible. First, his arms both crossed against the wall for him to lean his forehead on, but then he reached one back to take Dominic’s hand, and their fingers hung in a tight tangle by his right hip. His brow furrowed with concentration and Dominic bit his lip as they found each other’s places as clearly as possible in the air; he squeezed Matthew’s hand, and then kissed his shoulder blade before lining up and pushing inside.

  
The ghost’s head fell back and a strained curse burst from his lips. His insides coiled up and clenched in, drawing Dominic tighter inside. The other boy’s arms closed around him from behind, wrapping him up, and holding him in an embrace that soothed any lingering worries. Each breath painted steam shapes on the tiled wall.

  
His spine began to ache from the swell of Dominic’s cock, so deep and full that he was hesitant to press his weight backwards and start to move on it. The thought of it dragging and sliding through his insides was an intimidating one. Exhaling steadily, Matthew closed his eyes to give it a try when he felt a warm, wet flutter of fingers across his lower belly, and then they were wrapped around his cock.

  
The other boy’s hand was warm and tight, and it stroked and touched and twisted so exquisitely that Matthew felt his hips shift of their own volition, making the first arc that would pull Dominic a few inches out and then plunge him back inside again. 

  
No sensation to ever yet fire across Dominic’s brain compared to that first slick tug – to the suckle and squeeze of Matthew’s core each time he felt his cock sink inside. The ghost rocked gently back from the wall, his breathing feverish and ragged from pleasure. Dom put his hand firmly on Matthew’s arse and began soothing it before he pushed in, taking control.

  
It didn’t take long before Matthew became urgent and shivery. Murmurs came on every breath, too low for Dominic to hear, but sometimes whispered against the water or the wall so that he could see the shapes of the ghost’s small lips uttering them, defined in the steam or the bursts of water droplets running over his mouth. His hips drove onwards, hand still stroking and pleasing the other boy as their pace became feverish.

  
“Dom,” Matthew whimpered, his cock leaking. His hand reached back blindly, curling around Dominic’s hip to pull their bodies even closer together. “Dom-“

  
“I’m right here,” he smiled into the nape of his neck, wrapping his free arm tight around the boy’s chest. “It’s okay, Matt. Are you gonna come?”

  
“Going to come,” he echoed deliriously. “Love you, Dom.”

  
“Love you too,” he groaned, smiling, burying his face in Matthew’s hair and breathing him in. “You’re – really really good. This is – _Christ – really-“_  


  
His words cut out and fell away into a rough, husky grunt as Matthew’s insides did something different, and their slick fluttering as the ghost tumbled into his orgasm was possibly his favourite moment of the entire coupling. As Matthew mewled and cried with bliss, Dominic curled around him and hit his own climax with their hands laced together again, clutched tightly against Matthew’s stomach.

  
Matthew quivered and then stilled. Through his laboured breaths, he stared dazedly up at the ceiling and flopped his neck backwards to rest on Dominic’s shoulder.

  
“Fucking hell,” he said dreamily.

  
Dominic hummed into his hair, kissing his forehead.

  
“Oh look,” Matthew mumbled amusedly, “your spunk went right through me.”

  
Cracking an eye, the other boy peered down at the single white streak, which was sliding heavily down the tiles with the flow of the shower. He hummed again, smiling mildly.

  
Matthew closed his eyes. His thumb trailed over and over Dominic’s wrist, as though to soothe his rapid pulse.

  
“You’re quiet,” he whispered.

  
“Happy,” Dominic murmured, and closed his eyes into a contented smile as Matthew placed a small kiss on his lips. “Just… happy.”


	7. Rope Swing

It was a set of eyes wide with fear and shadowed from a sleepless night that lay upon Dominic’s door the next morning. With key in hand, her husband and the vicar of the local church were by her side as the lock turned. The boy’s mother briefly made the sign of the cross and then pushed the door inwards.

The air was warm and still in the attic, and bright from the early sunlight, which streamed through curtains that her son had not bothered to close the night before. As one, the three adults looked at the bed where they expected him to be lying. Dominic lay naked, curled up on his side, every inch of him drifting in warm, peaceful sleep; his body was paler than usual, and a closer look showed them that he was wreathed in soft light. The light was a single shape – it coiled and flexed suddenly, stretching out, and part of it rose up from the bed.

Dominic’s mother clutched at her husband’s arm. The vicar’s arm rose like he was about to make the sign, but his finger suspended in mid-air, caught on the breath that they all held as the light formed a figure. 

Matthew sat up, untangling himself from Dominic, and turned to stare with glowing eyes at the people who had disturbed his sleep. His glare flashed with light.

The vicar met that stare and paled.

“We’re going to need to call an exorcist,” he whispered.

He signed and pulled the adults out of the room, their feet stumbling and tripping against the floorboards as they fled the attic and bolted the door shut. His breath was rapid and frightened. Mere vicars did not expect their days to begin with hauntings.

“Is Dominic going to be alright?” his father asked. “Do you know where to find an exorcist?”

The vicar steadied his breath with a swallow and nodded. “He’ll be fine. The spirit doesn’t seem hostile towards him. As well as cleansing the room, the exorcist will be able to bless your son. He will be toxic to the spirit world.”

They hurried down the stairs and, on the other side of the door, Matthew listened to them leave. He looked back and Dominic was stirring, not so much in the movement of limbs, but in the way that his expression had taken on a troubled look; like he was waking, like he was aware of the things happening around him. The ignorant bliss of sleep slipped off completely and he blinked awake.

“Matthew,” he smiled.

The ghost’s concern melted for a moment and he crossed the room to kneel beside the other boy, cupping his cheek for a kiss that felt like mist.

“Dom,” he said, thumbing blonde behind one ear, “your parents saw me.”

His face went ashen and the smile faded away.

“And a preacher, some vicar,” Matthew finished, slumping from his kneeling position to sit on the edge of the bed. Dominic’s arms curled around his waist. “They’re calling an exorcist.”

“You’d better leave, then,” Dominic murmured, pressing his lips to the ghost’s bare shoulder. “Go on, go now, run while you have time. I’ll meet you at the tree when it’s safe to come back.”

Matthew’s gaze was hooded and his mouth was twisted downwards.

“They’re going to bless you.”

The boy’s eyes were wide with fear, but there was confusion in his face. He’d never heard of ghosts until a few days ago, much less the blessings that kept them at bay.

“What will that mean?”

Leaning into him, the ghost let out a sigh and wrapped his long hand around Dominic’s, stroking each of his fingers in turn. “You will become poison to me. To touch you would burn me up until there wasn’t anything left. It would be agony even to catch sight of you.”

Dominic’s jaw clenched. The room was very quiet as he took on the information. 

“And what about when I died? Would we be together once I was dead?”

“No, Dom,” he said quietly. “If we want to escape this, we both need to leave,” 

Dominic snorted a laugh through his nose; a half-hearted, humourless sound. “They’d find us. People can’t just _disappear._ The police would get involved; I’d need to find food, shelter…”

“We could make it, I could help, we’d-“

“No, Matt,” Dominic kissed the ghost’s shoulder again, his eyes low. His heart ached and his nerves were crackling with fear, but the decision he had to make wasn’t a hard one. “I’m coming with you, but I’m not doing it alive.”

Matthew made a faintly disgusted noise and moved away. His clothes had come back, though Dominic hadn’t noticed them reappearing. 

“That’s a risk,” he hissed, fretting at the loose threads of his sleeves, “and a decision that deserves more time than we have to give.”

Dominic curled up behind his knees. Grey and defiant, he stared the ghost down – Matthew broke eye contact and pretended to concentrate on his frayed sweatshirt.

“D’you not believe me when I tell you that I love you?”

“Christ, Dominic, that’s not the point!” Matthew spat back, his expression twisting up. “Believe it or not, I’m not some selfless fucking angel. I’m not here to question your commitment, or _help you make the right decision_. I’m shit. I’m sick. I was so hated that I am dead now, and if you _still_ say you want me more than life, I’m hardly about to appeal to your better judgement and refuse, am I?”

The sharp words pulled a tightness up Dominic’s throat and he swallowed it down. He could have cried, but held it back – not because of shyness, but because he realised that Matthew, without a doubt, would misunderstand the tears. 

There was hate in Matthew’s voice but it was twisted inwards, bent in on itself so violently that Dominic could see it in his bones – in the hunch of the shoulder blades that stuck out from his sweatshirt, or the mess of fingers angrily attacking his own sleeves – and it came with such vulnerability. He’d never seen Matthew in that state before. Tears were creeping up on him not because Matthew was angry, but because that anger revealed fragile, hidden things, and they proved that there was _so_ much more of the ghost to discover. The dark, hateful place in the ghost’s mind that was reserved only for himself was one that Dominic longed to soothe and comfort.

It wasn’t enough, but just for the moment, he shuffled closer and wrapped Matthew up in a close embrace.

“There’s so much of you I don’t know,” he smiled. Matthew looked back with surprise. “Only known you a few days, really. So much to explore.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t like the bits you haven’t seen yet,” he said drily.

“Think about how good it could be,” Dominic squeezed him, “all the time in the world together, just exploring, and talking, and sharing everything that we can. You could introduce me to your guardian angel,” he smiled.

“You might not even make it,” Matthew retorted, but his voice was a shade softer. “ _That’s_ the point, _that’s_ why this is a stupid plan. And you _want_ to die, so, you know, chances are you won’t even come back as a ghost.”

“I can do it,” he urged. “I swear I can do this, Matt. Concentrate really hard.”

“Well, you can’t use _me_ as your incentive, I’m _dead!”_

“No, you’re not. Not to me.”

Matthew’s eyes narrowed and he met Dominic’s determined stare. Neither blinked or breathed. Downstairs, the front door slammed as the adults left the building.

“Well then,” the ghost relented, sighing without breaking eye contact, “if you’re gonna do this, now’s your chance.”

“Right.” Dominic climbed out of bed to change into yesterday’s clothes. “Um… is there any… method… you’d recommend?”

Matthew glared.

“Well – I mean,” the other boy stuttered, pulling his sweatshirt over his head, “you hanged yourself, right? From the beams, or something? Where’d you get the rope?”

Fingers curling over and clenching on the sheets that he sat on, the ghost turned his head to look out of the window. Dominic followed his gaze. The tree stood alone on the hill, the swing hanging silent and motionless.

His eyes flicked back to Matthew, who was now beaming a wide, sarcastic smile at him.

“Oh, god,” the boy groaned, rubbing at his face and pacing over to the window. “Of course.”

“We’ll have proper matching bruises!” Matthew cooed, pulling down the neckline of his sweatshirt to show off the ring of dark blotches around his throat.

“We need to get down there.”

“Oh. _Fuck,”_ the ghost remembered. “Shit. Door’s locked.”

“Burn it down,” Dominic told him.

Matthew blinked hopefully and twisted around to stare at it. 

“Burn the door down?!”

“Yeah,” Dominic bit his lip nervously and stood up, “Do your heat thing, burn the lock away? Will that work?”

“It should do!”

The ghost wandered up to it, stroking one hand across the grain of the wood before pressing his palm just around the lock. He went very still.

Dominic shuffled from foot to foot. “Is it working?”

“Yep,” Matthew said tersely, adding another hand. “Stay back, don’t touch me, it’s-“

He was cut off by the loud snapping of sparks springing from wood, and then a flicker of yellow spread through his hands, the flames leaping out from his knuckles.

“Shit!” Dominic yelped, unable to keep from creeping forward to watch. Smoke was already clouding the space closest to the door as Matthew poured heat into the glowing wood – it began to disintegrate unnaturally fast, superheated, bursting out in blue flames. Dominic leapt back as a fragment burst out from the door, skittering across the floor and smouldering the wood it landed on.

“Okay,” Matthew twisted around, taking his hands from the door and wringing them, “push it, quick, you gotta open it before it spreads-“

His eyes watering from smoke, Dominic advanced on the door in a crouch, and kicked sharply. Showers of sparks rained down on his leg and he yelled, but they only tumbled off his jeans, and the door tumbled open, a gap opening up on the stairwell.

“Go!” he called backward at Matt, diving through the gap with his arms shielding his face from imagined flaming fragments. 

It only took a couple of flights down for the sound of the burning to fade away entirely, and Dominic found himself racing down eerily normal steps, each landing empty and the walls silent, as though detached from everything happening within them. An even stranger feeling was racing past the kitchen and catching sight of the cereal boxes lined up along the counter. Trivial details towered in the face of the terminal.

His fingers slipped on shoelaces and then wrenched the back door open. Flying across the patio, Dominic’s clothes snapped behind him, his trainer soles leaving prints in muddy patches amongst the grass on his way up the hill. Squinting up against the sun and brushing aside his hair, he could see Matthew now, glowing faintly against the trunk of the tree. The ghost was urgently chewing at his sleeve. His gaze kept flicking from Dominic’s approaching silhouette to the outside of the house.

Twisting back, Dominic snatched a glimpse of the building – smoke was beginning to coil from the roof, twisting out of the window, a dark column against overcast skies. He wrenched his eyes away and ran faster, stumbling over tiny knolls and heaps during the ascent. Matthew was stepping closer out of nervous impatience, like narrowing the gap between them would bring Dominic closer to the tree.

“I’m here,” he gasped, hands-on-knees to recover, the cold morning air searing his lungs. “I’m here.”

He straightened and they paused to look at each other. A shy smile twitched in the corners of their mouths.

The sound of a car door slamming echoed up the hillside.

_ “Shit,”  _ Matt’s face went wide-eyed and filled with horror. Dominic paled and glanced uneasily just behind the ghost’s shoulder.

The tyre hung motionless below its branch.

“So, I suppose, I,” he started, brushing past Matthew and laying a hand on the tyre with trembling fingers, “I want to untie the tyre? Yes?”

“Yeah,” Matthew nodded quickly, looking just as worried. “Yeah, get the knot apart, quick-“

Dominic’s pale fingers scrunched up and worked into the knot, finding it worn solid and stiff from decades of open air. Still catching his breath with a little gasp, he grit his teeth and forced it open. The fibres scratched his knuckles. He dug deeper, raising one knee to balance the tyre’s weight away from the knot. 

It slipped; the tyre fell to the earth.

“That’s it, that’s brilliant,” Matthew urged. His whole body was tensed in a rigid, vertical line, eyes frightful and trained on the house. He could hear panicked voices. The smoke was pouring out now.

“How do I do this?”

Dominic’s voice trembled violently and the ghost twisted around to look at him.

“Um,” Matthew tried, coming closer, “now you climb the tree.”

“Up the tree?”

“Yes, love,” he murmured, forcing a tiny smile, “up the tree.”

“Come up with me?”

He sounded so small. He sounded like Matthew had himself felt on this hillside, not too long ago. The ghost’s chest got tight and his heart got painful, the way it does before a lump forms in your throat, and he stepped forward to press his lips to Dominic’s cold cheek for one last ghostly kiss.

“Of course,” he whispered. “I’m watching over you, Dom.”

“Thankyou,” the boy breathed. He was blinking more than usual; his eyes were shining.

“And – and, if this goes wrong, if they get to you first,” Matthew added, “I still will, I’ll still watch over you, even if I can’t share your life with you, I promise.”

Dominic bit his lip and swallowed, looking up into the branches of the tree twisting above their heads. Sunlight was filtering through.

“Right, then. Better make sure it works.”

He grabbed the rope – curled into unnatural twists at the end, from where it had been wrapped around the tyre – and hoisted himself up to the first branch.

Bark pressed grooves into his hands, cutting in the cold air, and Matthew followed with his strange weightlessness just behind. Dominic had just reached the branch that was tied to the other end of the rope when he heard it – Matthew froze too and leaned around the trunk, staring out towards the house. Three figures were advancing up the hill.

“Oh my god,” Dominic breathed shakily, taking the rope in both hands and forming a loop with it. “How do I – how do you tie-“

“Make a loop,” Matthew instructed, “and wind that bit-“

“What bit?”

“This – _here, Dom –_ fuck, why can’t _I_ do it-“

There were voices now, sharp and clear, carrying up the incline towards them.

“That’s it!” Matthew exclaimed, shaping out the knot with his fingers. “Pull through, pull through-“

“Yeah,” Dominic said, his mouth dry, “yep, that’s a noose.”

He looked down at it for a moment and then gingerly placed it around his neck, tightening at the back until it fit snugly. The rope was rough. He could feel the knot, a hard bulk just behind his left ear, already making him feel weak even though it wasn’t pressing at his skin yet.

“Does it hurt?”

“What?”

“Does it hurt,” he repeated, his lips quivering, “suffocating?”

“You’re not going to suffocate,” Matthew answered, “it’ll break your neck first, I promise, you’re not going to feel a thing.”

“I – okay,” Dominic blinked, looking down at the earth so far below, not sure whether he’d just heard good or bad news. 

They could pick out individual voices now. Dominic’s mother was screaming his name; the boy looked up, his hands going limp against his neck.

“Don’t listen,” the ghost begged. “Not now, Dom.”

“I’m scared.”

“Look at me?”

Looking across, Dominic’s teeth chattered in his mouth. Matthew’s body was faint in the daylight, only a sketch of a face.

“It’s good that you’re scared, remember, you want to survive,” the ghost told him, glancing down to where the figures ran, now close enough that he could see their footprints carved out in the dew. “The whole time, concentrate on that. You don’t want to be dead.”

“Okay,” he stammered, his lungs heaving like they were already struggling to take in air. “Right. S-see you.”

He lifted his weight away from the branch, pulling upwards as though about to climb higher. Body poised above nothing, he uncurled his legs through the empty space, and then let go.

The rope snaked and writhed violently, uncoiling, snapping leaves and twigs in its path.

A sickening crack sounded from Dominic’s body as it bounced at the end of the noose, so harsh that, for a moment, Matthew thought that the branch had broken instead.

A scream carried down the hillside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's both a happy and a sad ending after this - the next chapter (8) is the happy ending, and if you want the sad ending then skip past it to chapter 9.


	8. Rope Swing (happy ending)

  
Whether his eyes were open or closed, the world had gone white. He wasn’t sure he even possessed eyes. Every inch – every moment, every thought – was drowned in a high pitched sound that splintered Dominic’s mind. Curling over and making himself as small as he could, he willed himself to outlive it with all of his strength.

Matthew rained down from the tree, not even bothering to keep his form intact as he fell to Dominic’s side, catching the pale stream of particles that tumbled out of the boy’s limp body and cradling them to his tummy. It was like cupping smoke in his hands; holding it to himself protectively, Matthew curled up and sprung back into the branches. Dominic’s father had cleared the crest of the hill, his vision presumably too blurred and fixed on his son to notice the second figure scaling the tree.

“Dom?” Matthew whispered, opening out his hands and letting the pale shapes shift in the still air. 

They spasmed and twisted violently. He was through. The ghost felt relieved tears drawing chilled lines down his cheek, but couldn’t brush them off; smoky tendrils were faintly anchored to the surface of his skin by tension. 

Beneath the tree, Dominic’s father let out a terrible, distressed howl. The rope a few branches away was jerking and creaking horribly as his mother tried to lift her son to ease the weight on his broken neck.

“Dom!” Matthew tried again, starting to sound worried. He lay his palm to what he could only assume was the edge of the cloud; it flickered between solid and not, as though it was slipping in and out of the air. “Dom, can you hear me?”

He was just getting anxious and frustrated enough to consider shaking the cloud when it blinked. A corner of the smoke now held, unmistakably, the shape of an eye.

“Oh, my god, Dom, I’m here,” Matthew breathed, ignoring the crying from below the tree and moving to cradle Dominic’s form in his lap. Wisps of smoke were sneaking and spreading further than before – it was impossible to hold him in both hands any longer.

“I don’t know where I am,” came a tiny voice, the cloud shifting to form Dominic’s lips. The eye searched desperately from side to side, full of pain. “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know-“

“You’re here, with me, I’m here,” the ghost babbled, stroking one hand over and over Dominic’s new cheek. “I’ve got you, Dom.”

“I can’t see,” he said, and the eye leaked a tear, “I can’t see, I can’t breathe, I don’t know where I am-“

“It’s me,” Matthew tried. He was starting to panic now. He was sure Dominic should have been able to hear. “You’re safe, Dom.”

“Kill me,” the mouth uttered, and a tear slid down the side of a new jaw; a new neck. “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.”

“No,” he shook his head, heart breaking. “No, Dom, don’t.”

“Give him here.”

Matthew jumped hard enough at the new voice that he might have fallen out of the tree, had he been a human. The speaker had already swept to his side in a blur, body melting effortlessly through the branches. Wings the colour of mahogany arched up gracefully and then folded to the guardian angel’s back. 

The ghost stared up at Christopher, tears drying on his cheeks, and continued to clutch Dominic to his chest.

“Quickly, Matt.”

Coming to his senses, Matthew handed Dominic over. He was filled with the urge to burst into tears and cling onto the angel for all he was worth, but Christopher was now resting Dominic’s smoky form across his lap.

His hand smoothed and roamed across the pale tangles of Dominic’s chest, pressing it into shape, the other palm cupping the boy’s cheek. Bent almost double so that they were nose to nose, he whispered gentle things too low for Matthew to make out. Slowly, Dominic’s cries stilled and he began to fall limp. Christopher hoisted him up under the arms and settled the newborn ghost to rest against his chest, one wing curling protectively to his side.

“Don’t worry,” Christopher said softly, looking over Dominic’s shoulder to where Matthew was perched anxiously on a skinny branch. “You were just the same when you came through. Worse, even.”

“W-worse?”

“Yeah, you bit me.”

“Oh,” he said, worrying his lower lip between his teeth. “I don’t remember that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Christopher began stroking the trembles out of Dominic’s spine. He eased his newly-formed legs into a more comfortable position. “You were just scared, same as him.”

Matthew didn’t say anything.

“Are you okay?”

Matthew nodded numbly in response, not taking his eyes off the curled up bundle in Christopher’s arms. Glancing down through the branches, he spied a small, broken bundle beneath a white sheet.  Three paramedics were easing it onto a stretcher. He looked away quickly, feeling faintly sick. 

“Here,” Christopher leaned in, gently lifting Dominic upright, “you take him. He’ll be fine now, just hold him tight, let him know you’re there.”

He carefully took Dominic back into his arms. The ghost was shaking all over but his eyes were closed, and the moment he felt Matthew press a kiss to his cheek, he instinctively clung to him with new arms and buried his face in Matthew’s sweater for comfort. Stroking a curtain of pale gold hair aside, Matthew looked down and saw a new circle of angry bruises around Dominic’s neck. A little below them was last night’s love bite; he smiled despite himself.

“Who is he?”

Matthew hugged Dominic tightly and kissed the top of his head.

“Really special.”

“I can see that,” Christopher smiled. He moved closer and wrapped an arm around Matthew’s shoulders, wings flexing behind them both. “Just as well, too. He’s going to need a lot of looking after for a while.”

“Will you help me?” Matthew asked, leaning against the guardian angel.

“Of course, little one,” Christopher lay a gentle kiss on the smaller ghost’s cheek. “After all, I’m his angel, too.”   



	9. Rope Swing (not so happy ending)

“He fell for it, then.”

“They always do.”

Christopher smirked and gathered Matthew into his lap, teasing his fingers through the small ghost’s hair. They gazed down through the branches as the last leaves of autumn fell; the limp body of Dominic Howard was a small heap beneath an untidy spool of cut rope. Paramedics quickly moved to straighten his limbs. The west wall of the burning house beyond was flashing blue.

“How was he?”

Matthew curled up tightly to Christopher’s chest. “Very decent. Sex was okay. Oh, that reminds me, that makes a hat-trick.”

“Does it?”

“Blonde bullied English boys.”

Christopher tutted lightly. “That’s not very specific.”

“Blonde bullied English boys whose virginities I take in the shower,” Matthew corrected, looking irritable. “Give me _some_ credit.”

Pursing his lips with amusement, Christopher lowered his gaze to where the investigators were now dragging away a stretcher. Officers and paramedics trailed back and forth between the house and the hill like lines of worker ants bringing home a meal; firefighters milled around the gravel courtyard in the distance.

“Where now?”

“You get to choose,” Matthew leaned his head back and beamed up at his guardian angel. “Your turn.”

Christopher gifted the ghost’s smiling mouth with a tender kiss. “A city. A city, somewhere hot.”

“Desert-hot?”

“Tropics-hot. Humid. Heavy.” He climbed upright from their branch, as far as spirits can climb, and unfurled his wings between the branches, brown against brown, the sharp angles of twigs appearing ugly against impeccably arching feathers. “Jakarta.”

Showing his teeth in a cruel grin, Matthew clambered upright. Christopher disintegrated before him, every particle shifting and tumbling like a dry sandcastle, becoming little more than a breath of dust that lingered in the air. The boy twisted to look back – just once, to pick out the pale speck of Dominic’s lifeless body across the hill – and then he too dissolved into the sky to be carried east with his love, a mere whisper of warmth on the wind.

  



End file.
